Ezra Pound and Coherence

In Canto 116, Ezra Pound admitts to the inevitable outcome of his poetic project:

But the beauty is not the madness
Tho' my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.

Though this seems like a stark admission of failure, he has actually been admitting this failure all along. The poems in Lustra, for example, show the provisional nature of any poetic creation. While he has great faith in his "songs," he also admits that they are naive ("Salutation the Second") or ineffective ("Further Instructions"). Pound's blustery poetic voice and the fierce imperatives addressed to his poems can be countered by the anxiety and tentativeness available to closer readings.

Rather than writing direct poems with pictures of the world, Pound wrote many poems in which the poet addresses the poem. While definitely lacking a "picture," I believe they do present an image (i.e. an emotional tension between two perspectives, which usually has the outcome of endangering an unproblematized perception of the self). In effect, there's a sort of doubling going on in these poems. That is, the poet exists as a maker, but the made objects are spoken to as if they are themselves actors in the world. The poet is the creator god, but his creations bound through the world, interacting with it in various ways. The tension caused by these poems is effected through their ineffectiveness, as in "Further Instructions":

You are very idle, my songs.
I fear you will come to a bad end.
You stand about in the streets,
You loiter at the corners and bus-stops,
You do next to nothing at all.

You do not even express our inner nobilities,
You will come to a very bady end.

And I?
I have gone half cracked,
I have talked to you so much that

I almost see you about me

Insolent little beasts, shameless, devoid of clothing!

Pound recognizes an inevitable failure in poetic speech, but then he addresses his newest poems, speaking of his hopes for them. Poetry, from this perspective, is not just an iterative process, but a never-ending process. Like Lacan's chain of desire, Pound is always moving outward, searching. His songs are versions of the truth, examples of his passions, creations of himself that are always failures, but are the failures necessary for being.

In a way, his most emblematic poem is "Ortus," which means birth or a springing outward. Whether spoken to the poem, the reader, or the poet himself, the final stanza insists on the primacy of speech and artistic labor in bringing forth one's being:

I beseech you enter your life.
I beseech you learn to say "I"
When I question you:
For you are no part, but a whole;
No portion, but a being.