Patricia Rae on Ezra Pound

Patricia Rae's psychological approach to poetry is intruiging because it is so peculiar. We've all heard of psychoanalytic criticism based on the widely varied perpsectives of Freud, Lacan, Jung, and French feminist psychoanalysts, but Rae applies the theories of William James to literature. I can't say I've encountered this perspective before. There's one immediately appealing aspect of Jamesian criticism: he's an American. If one accepts the idea that literary texts are produced by individuals within a historical and cultural moment marked by an identifiable zeitgeist, then American writers must be marked by quintessentially American ideas. The culture that produces Ezra Pound produces William James.

Because I've read very little James, I'm thankful that Rae takes the time to describe some Jamesian ideas in the early going. Unfortunately, I get the sense that Rae is primarily interested in only one aspect of James's ideas: religious experience and the necessarily provisional relationship between this experience and our ideas of Truth. This careful balance between belief in the transcendental reality of God and its outright rejection is intriguing because it occasions a conversation about the ontological nature of the world and ourselves within it.

Unfortunately, the insistence on this question sometimes seems misguided, leading to empty or narrow interpretations of the poetry under consideration. The poems get reduced to salvos in a very specific discussion, rather than acting as vast and complicated creations in their own right. Rae's discussion of Pound's "Coitus" is a good example of this shortcoming. Its one brief paragraph focuses on the poem's reference to the lack of "dead gods"; she reads the poem only in terms of its "cautious respect for spiritualism" (89). But this reading ignores the striking image of "gilded phaloi" that thrust at the spring air. Um, shouldn't a poem called "Coitus" with thrusting phaloi at least mention desire?

What's especially frustrating is that James's ideas seem to make possible readings so much better than the one Rae provides. For example, the speaker's relationship to the deities in the poem is, I think, more intricate than a simple show of respect. Instead, the entire sensible world surrounding the speaker exhibits sensuality and, particularly, sexuality. As a being in the world, the speaker is affected by this sexuality. It infuses the speaker (who, importantly, speaks in the plural for "us"). Rather than displaying respect for an external (though always tentative) spiritual power, the poem is more interested in the drama of environmental (i.e. external) causes and subjective (i.e. internal) causes of desire.

Rae omits the last two lines of the poem: "The dew is upon the leaf. / The night about us is restless." Pound's insistence that the poem end with "us" in the center of this maelstrom of sexual desire in the natural world suggests that the same energy flows through us. Though it is perhaps claustrophobic (because it is "about us" and "restless"), this desire is of us. Pound uses the deity, the figure of Dione, to dramatize the externalization of the internal -- and ultimately its failure to keep desire at bay. What makes Pound's poem so powerful is the psychological tension between the god responsible for generating desire and the physiological body equipped with the phallus. The act of symbolizing attributes of the self in the form of a deity is the primary process in the poem.

And from what I have read, this if fundamentally anti-Jamesian, who rejects such symbolization and always goes back to the physiological basis of emotion. Pound and James have entirely different interests. If the two thinkers can be brought together in a productive way, it must be by investigating the tension of their opposing directions. What, for me, has always been disappointing about James is that his concept of emotion, which is based on physiological manifestations, rejects the seemingly universal tendency in human beings to understand themselves through external narratives. In treating the externalization of desire, Pound's "Coitus" is endlessly more fascinating and productive than James's reduction. And, though I'm interested to continue reading Rae's The Practical Muse, I'm hoping that she explores this friction between the two thinkers rather than finding a limp and perhaps inaccurate conjunction of thought.