My most significant problem is that Pound's theory and his practice don't overlap very well. After reading some of the theory ("Vorticism" and "A Retrospect"), I was convinced that Pound was not interested in -- or at least not only interested in -- a poetry of scientific precision and concision. To me it seemed clear that he saw the image as a productive sort of confusion of objects, a conflation of attributes. The tension or energy of these conflations cut through sentimentality, flaccid commentary, and our received ways of knowing.
This seemed fitting when I read H.D.'s "Oread" and the examples in Pound's critical work. Then I read the poetry, mostly from Lustra. Now I'm confused. At times, I run across examples of Pound practicing what he so fervently preached, but not very often. "Alba" is a great manifestation of his principles (as I see them):
As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.
The most immediate contrast here is the simile that links the lover to physical coolness rather than the warmth of an embrace or of lying next to each other. The cognitive difficulty of this simile slowly disrupts our habituated notion of lovers and warmth. We recognize that the lovers lie together at the end of a night together. Warmth is lost; passion has concluded. The surface tension of coolness where we might expect warmth leads us to the underlying concept of this poem: a contrast of beginnings and endings. As an alba (i.e. a poem about the dawn), the poem celebrates the beginning of the day. But at the same time, it mourns the passing of night's passion. If one takes the beginning of day as a poetic figure for the beginning of life, then we live in a post-pleasure, postlapsarian world. This fits with the origin of lily-of-the-valley in Eve's tears after expulsion from Eden.
So far so good, but then there are so many poems in Lustra that simply don't work this way. Since it's getting late, I'll have to pick this up on another night.
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