Ezra Pound and Individuation

My latest realization has to do with Pound's hypostasizing of desire (rather than letting it flow, Deleuze and Guattari style). The poetic image is a freezing of desire, a metamorphosis of an active situation into an image of a beautiful natural object. I use "Alba," "Gentildonna," and even "In a Station of the Metro" to show how erotic situations of possible connection are frozen into images of wet leaves or petals. In other words, these "Imagistic" poems don't operate by laying one image over another; the second image is a consequence (or the result) of the first. The paradigmatic form of this metamorphosis is Ovid's telling of the Apollo and Daphne myth: Apollo, inflamed with desire, chases Daphne, who transforms into a tree. The tree is the unattainable; desire is hypostasized rather than spent.

The desire is repressed and read into the self. In fact, this is how individuation occurs. Freud's notion of the sexual-instincts and the ego-instincts is useful here. What Pound's speakers do not invest in (social) intercourse with others is invested into the self. These poems re-enact the separation from the mother, the individuation process. The mother must become a distinct and separate object (like a leaf or a petal -- still beautiful and desirable) in order for the child to become the subject. Pound's "Ortus" reveals this two-way individuation process: "How have I laboured to bring her soul into separation / To give her a name and her being!" To be distinct, the flows must stop; desire must be hypostasized. The poetic image is the metamorphosis into the tree, leaf, or petal -- but it occasions the poet's own birth. "Ortus" means "birth" or "springing out." The mother is conceived of as a separate being so that the poet can exist: "For you are no part, but a whole, / No portion, but a being."

The tragic part of this formulation is that this lost connection is always mourned. The poems, which represent individuation and hypostasis, are meant to connect with the reading audience. Pound is terribly concerned with the reader's reaction to the poem. The poem is a means toward reintegration, reconnection, (social) intercourse. And yet, they seem bound to fail because the flows required have been extracted, hypostasized in their images. Pound exhorts his poems: "Come, my songs, let us express our baser passions" ("Further Instructions"), or "Ruffle the skirts of prudes, / speak of their knees and ankles" ("Salutation the Second"). Even the suggestively sexual poems like "The Encounter" and "The Garden" are descriptions of possible but unconsummated desire. In the form of always-merely-possible lovers, Pound re-enacts the tragic separation from the mother that simultaneously allows him his subjectivity. The final lines of "Of Jacopo del Sellaio" summarize this drama quite well:

And here's the thing that lasts the whole thing out:
The eyes of this dead lady speak to me.

Ezra Pound and the Transformation of Genital Fluid

Ezra Pound's postcript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont's The Natural Philosophy of Love begins by accepting as a possibility the idea that the brain is "only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve" (295). Instead of merely being a kooky idea, however, this is a kooky idea that fits well with my reading of Pound's poetry, and in particular fits with the Apollo complex I've been developing to characterize Pound's poetic and philosophical perspective.

It's important to note that Pound uses this idea as a springboard for his aesthetic and practical concerns. In particular, he argues that Gourmont's idea "would explain the enormous content of the brain as a maker or presenter of images" (295). There is a direct link between male sexual desire and the creative impulse. While this seems to simply play into that tired old differentiation between men and women as "active" and "passive" principles, it is important to recognize the relation of this idea to Pound's notion of the image. It is not simply that "creative thought is an act like fecundation, like the male cast of the human seed" (301); it is also that the "spermatozoic particle" has "a capacity for formal expression: is not thought precisely a form-comparing and a form-combining?" (301).

Pound exerts a certain pressure on the genital fluid to exceed its base beginnings in order to develop into ideas, form-combinings. So my earlier reading of
"Alba" can be developed further by suggesting that the seeming peacefulness of the poem's setting actually represents a dissolution of the self and a passing of the potential energy of the speaker's sperm. Because he is sexually spent, he is also spent of ideas.

Ezra Pound and the Apollo Complex

Ezra Pound's "Heather" makes use of the figure of a familiar, a supernatural spirit in the form of an animal that is linked to a person:

The black panther treads at my side,
And above my fingers
There float the petal-like flames.

The milk-white girls
Unbend from the holly-trees,
And their snow-white leopard
Watches to follow our trace.

The male is represented by black and by flames, suggesting the burning of desire and the hunting of the sexual object. The female is twice described as white and is wary of the hunter.

This is a fairly typical scenario in that it relies on standard sexual roles, but there are a few things about this poem that make it worth discussing. First, it reflects the sort of "Apollo complex" identified in other works by Ezra Pound. I use the phrase Apollo complex to refer to a man's recognition of his own sexuality and the simultaneous recognition that he must control that desire in order to control himself. This tension is a fundamental aspect of male subjectivity. Again recalling the Apollo and Daphne myth, the girls "Unbend from the holly trees," suggesting that the spark of sexual desire is rekindled as the girls transform from tree back to human form.

There is also the suggestion that the girls' familiar, the white leopard, is in some sense the hunter: "And their snow-white leopard / Watches to follow our trace." The leopard follows the panther, and can be read as a sort of snare that catches the men -- just like Daphne, chased by Apollo, turns into a tree, but ends up encircling Apollo's head in the form of a wreath.

The concept of women ensnaring men is also found in Pound's "Portrait d'une Femme," in which women are depicted as a Sargasso Sea waylaying sailors. These are more than just unattractive portraits of women (although they are that); these poems are also condemnations of the drive to pleasure in men. Sex is a dissolution of self (as seen in "Alba"). For Pound, it is better to sublimate desire into forms of control.

Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro"

I suppose anyone dealing with Ezra Pound and Imagism must respond to "In a Station of the Metro." I'm going to provide what is likely an idiosyncratic reading, but one I believe is made available by the text itself and Pound's critical statements.

Before I attempt a closer reading, I want to take note of a point made by John T. Gage in his brilliant analysis of Imagism, In the Arresting Eye. He argues that many Imagist poems work by simply juxtaposing two scenes without identifying one as the "figure" and the other as the "ground." That is, the poems are made up of comparisons, but are unlike similes or metaphors in that they don't privilege one of the terms and use another simply to clarify it. By simply giving us the two scenes without a way to relate them, the poem introduces ambiguity.

The part I don't understand about Gage's argument is his contention that the function of this device "is to promote a belief in the harmony of words and things" (86). How does that happen? Gage suggests that this interchangeability indicates an underlying order. But I find this ambiguity potentially more upsetting. I disagree with that large collection of scholars, including Herbert Schneidau, who argue that Imagists seek or achieve some sort of objectivity, or even "the object" itself. Pound is very clear that he doesn't present the object. Instead, Pound defines the image as "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." In short, he presents a complex, not an object. The critic's task is to read the object as a means toward understanding the complex.

***

"In a Station of the Metro"

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

This is admittedly a complex poem. All I can do is try to offer a compelling interpretation, not necessarily the only interpretation. I'm going to start by suggesting that the two scenes have a much closer relationship than is often posited. Most critics suggest that the two descriptions are quite distinct from one another; the poem's meaning is created by the radical juxtaposition of the two statements. But I think they may be part of the same scene. In particular, I'm interested in the conflation of "faces" and "bough" into an image of human trees.

At first glance, this sounds ridiculous, but it gains more credence when one considers how frequently and powerfully Pound uses the myth of Daphne and Apollo in his work (in which, according to Ovid's version, the love-struck Apollo chases the nymph Daphne until her only escape from his lust is her metamorphosis into a tree). Pound's very early poem "The Tree" is explictly about the myth, and "A Girl" retells the transformation from Daphne's point of view. Other similarities can be found throughout his work, for example, from "Heather" ("The milk-white girls / Unbend from the holly-trees") or from "Dance Figure" ("Thine arms are as a young sapling under the bark"). These examples provide a context for reading "In a Station of the Metro" in a similar way. The poetic speaker (or poetic "noticer," since there isn't a figure who takes the role of poetic speaker), mentally metamorphoses the faces into petals on a tree branch.

There are a number of tensions comprised in this fused image. It's perhaps a bit vulgar to rely on simple binaries, but here goes. First, there's insubstantial/substantial. An "apparition" a strange sight, but it's also a ghost, something airy or ethereal. This is contrasted by the heavy clinginess of the petals on the wet, black bough. Even the meter of the second line suggests heaviness with its final three stressed syllables.

A second and related binary is mobility/immobility. "Apparition" acts almost like a verb, like "to appear." The faces and the crowd can be imagined as in motion. But the petals and the bough are stationary, unable to move.

These binaries replicate the tension between the drive toward pleasure and the restriction of that drive. The reader understands that people in motion in the first line are made still in the second line; the animate is made inanimate. Like Daphne's metamorphosis, the move from the first line to the second is a restriction of (Apollo's) pleasure.

Of course, the immobility of the transformation is merely (Apollo's) desire made perpetual, not the satisfaction or quelling of desire. In Ovid:

"'Although thou canst not be my bride, thou shalt
be called my chosen tree, and thy green leaves,
O Laurel! shall forever crown my brows,
be wreathed around my quiver and my lyre"

Apollo carries this desire, this frustration of satisfaction, wreathed around his head and "quiver." Pound's poem captures this feeling not just by the substitution of trees for people, but by the stasis of the image. Pound's description of the genesis of this poem is also helpful:

"Three years ago in Paris I got out of a "metro" train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another, and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion" ("Vorticism").

The appearance of the beautiful faces was followed by the recognition that he could not obtain them, and it was only through the poetic image of the wet, black bough that he was able to obtain them. I would suggest that the poem's juxtaposition of images, without elaborating a logical connection between them, leads to the psychological complex about pleasure's unattainability. Like Freud's notion of the dream-work, in which a dream's manifest content is made up of condensations and displacements of the latent dream ideas (or wishes), this poem is an example of the dream-work. It requires not merely rhetorical analysis to make sense of it, but also psychoanalysis.

Postscript: I added the label "Apollo complex" to this post when I came up with the term on October 25, 2009.

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.

Poems about Albas

I find so many of Pound's poems in Lustra vexing because they don't work like "Alba." They don't give us the naturalistic picture that "Alba" and other Imagist poems do. Many of them are the poet's addresses to his poems, or songs. Here's a brief example:

"Ite"
Go, my songs, seek your praise from the young and from the intolerant,
Move among the lovers of perfection alone.
Seek ever to stand in the hard Sophoclean light
And take your wounds from it gladly.

The difficulty in approaching these poems lies in the fact that they don't seem like poems; they implore poems to do things, and as such do not work like poems themselves. I've been considering these poems in light of (my conception of) Pound's theory of poetic images. My conception, again, is that the poetic image is a conflation or tension between two things that leads to a productive and meaningful burst of insight.

I would argue that there's an aspect of the image even in "Ite." The surface reading seems pretty straightforward: the poet requires that his songs be held to the highest of standards. But underneath that reading is the understanding that perfection is never possible. There is a tension between moving and standing. The poems are told to "Seek ever" toward the possibility of stasis, the ability to stand in one place. The poet wants the poem to stand "in the hard Sophoclean light," as if that is the great achievement of being, but the poem is inevitably wounded in the glare of that light. As Ruthven points out in "A Guide to Ezra Pound's Personae," Sophocles is invoked to refer to cutting through the dreaminess of the poetry of the 1890s. His essay "A Few Don'ts" encourages poets to eliminate unnecessary words, working toward greater concision. But the poem that seeks this light is ever wounded, suffering continual amputations toward perfection. Being, for the poem, is most fully realized by submitting to the ultimate concision that erases it from being. The tension of this paradox is the image.

Albas

I guess I've made a promise to write about the poetry of Ezra Pound.... Whoever wrote my oral exam paper proposal promised to shed light on "the structure of desire" in Ezra Pound's early poetry and poetic theory. And now I have to do it...and soon.

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.

Aristotle on Discovery

I set myself a difficult task by promising to read Aristotle's On Poetics. The goal was to gain insight into how poetry works, but Aristotle is primarily interested in narrative. It's refreshing to read a carefully structural analysis written by someone who still believes that there's such a thing as the Perfect Plot. His ideas make particularly good starting points for discussions about drama and fiction, but their applicability to poetry is complicated.

It seems more productive to work negatively; that is, start with something that Aristotle focuses on and then chart its absence in lyric poetry. The thing that jumps out at me is the fascinating discussion of "discovery." He lists the ways in which characters may discover information about themselves or others and what these discoveries can lead to. For Aristotle, the greatest discoveries are those that lead to a change in fortunes for the hero. His fate or the fate of others hangs in the balance.

I turn to modern lyric poetry and ask myself what the "characters" discover and what hinges on these discoveries. Because I'm focusing on Ezra Pound for an upcoming project, I think of his work. But I discover that overt discoveries are rare, at least within the bounds of the poems themselves. First problem: often the only "character" in a lyric poem is the poetic speaker. Second problem: these poems are often aestheticized statements of previously-held positions. There is not a change but an attempt articulate or confirm a given perspective. This is especially true of Pound, who spends a lot of time asserting rather than searching for discoveries. Here's the first two lines of "Salvationists" as an example:

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection-
We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

Pound has a position and he asserts it. There's a certain amount of bluster in poems of this sort. Perhaps more useful in this discussion are those poems (unfortunately more rare) which most faithfully hold to the Imagist ideal. "Alba" serves as a good example:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

There is something to this poem, but the poetic speaker does not actually make a discovery. That is, there is no before the discovery and after the discovery. Aristotle joins the discovery to the peripety (the change in direction or fortunes). Instead, the discovery seems to be the reader's prerogative. The poem is basically a simile offered to the reader, but one that isn't dramatically experienced by the speaker. What do we make of this equivalence? It seems that narratives structure discovery, while lyrics juxtapose suggestions, bequeathing discovery on readers.

Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny"

The first section of Freud's essay examines the etymology of the German word heimlich. Rather than being an exercise meant to discover clarity and univocality, Freud's investigation leads to a productive ambivalence of meanings. Heimlich means "familiar and comfortable" as well as that which is "concealed and kept hidden." Freud reads in his linguistic evidence the inability of language to refer to the world unambiguously.

This is a useful observation for my purposes for two reasons. First, it effectively undercuts that objectivist strain of modernism that believes in the possibility of scientific accuracy available in carefully controlled and concise language. Second, it reintroduces psychological processes into the poetic attempt to make meaning. That is, language is not solely a system of cognitive or intellectual meaning; it is also a system through which desire moves...or attempts to move. Language, like the self, is the site of struggle, the locus of desire and its restriction.

Freud identifies two temporal transformations that cause the uncanny. The first is the transformation from child to adult; the second is the transformation from primitive culture to civilized culture. (Please note that several of the terms in this last phrase probably need quotation marks to indicate pointed irony, though ambivalence is probably more what I'm aiming for). Freud examines literary tales to identify several tropes and how they make the transformations on each of the stated levels. Since I don't have the energy to write about all of the tropes raised by Freud, I'll choose "the double" because I think it may be applicable to some of the modernist poetry I've been reading.

(There's probably a larger conversation I need to have about my views on poetry itself. Though I recognize I need to provide a better explanation of how I read lyric poetry as distinct from other literary forms such as narrative fiction, I don't think I can accomplish it just yet. There will hopefully be more to come on this topic when I read Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism in early August).

Ezra Pound's poem "The Rest" provides an opportunity to examine ambivalence, uncanniness, and desire all through the figure of the double. "The Rest" takes as its subject the American poets Pound left behind when he became an expatriate. He speaks to those like-minded artists who are left to starve in the harsh artistic barrenness of America. In a way, its an address to his double, the person he may have become had he stayed in the U.S. This haunting double raises the problem of the uncanny: America is both the "familiar and comfortable" home, but it is that which must be put behind in order to emerge as a worldly artist.

Like Freud's ambivalent heimlich, Pound's exile at the end becomes troubled by its own opposite. The poem's final stanza hollows out the triumph he seems to be claiming: "Take thought: / I have weathered the storm, / I have beaten out my exile" (17-19). Weathering a storm means surviving a difficulty, but it also means he was seen safely through. Weathering can be seen to wear one down or slowly dissolve the substance of being, but it might also be viewed as the force which shapes the remaining substance. "Beaten" is also ambivalent. In one way, the speaker physically beats his double, who remains at home in America to read Pound's poem about how they've been broken. To beat a path means to make an escape, but also to wear down by traveling back and forth. In a figurative sense, Pound travels back to America by writing of it. Like the ontological necessity Hegel describes in the master/slave relationship, Pound is an exile only because he is an American.

It might be too much to say that "The Rest" is uncanny, but it does reveal an ambivalent transformation between childhood and adulthood as the speaker compares a later self to another possiblity for his earlier self. And, though I don't have time to examine it more closely, there also seems to be something going on at the sociological level. Rather than Freud's primitive-to-civilization, however, Pound might actually reverse the trajectory. Those in America who love the beauty of old-world European high culture are "thwarted" by the "systems" and "control" promoting what Pound calls "false knowledge." Heimlich is the European home from which we came, but the ambivalence involved in Pound's poem suggests that this home is only a home-away-from-home where Pound is left to contemplate his ghostly double.

Philip Kuberski on Ezra Pound

Kuberski contends that Pound sought the type of objectivity in language that was unavailable due to Saussure's and Freud's destabilizations. Kuberski argues that Pound attempts to reverse this relativism and put language back together, recovering the foundation of language and its significance.

I appreciate Kuberski's text because he recognizes the ambivalence of Pound's aims. That is, Pound's desire for solidity and an unassailable grounding of language and culture is destabilized by his own poetic practice. Kuberski writes: "Pound can create an unrequited desire for resolution by each new fragment that necessarily delays it; desire for presence and origin is extended by each eruption of absence and citation" (8). So Pound's poetic technique is unequivocally "modernist" while it appears to reclaim all the stability undone by modernism.

Kuberski is particularly interested in what is specifically American about what he calls "the duplicity of the sign." This is an immensely intriguing phrase and I think it could be usefully applied to Pound's notion of the poetic image. Kuberski seems to use the term "duplicity" to mean an intended breakdown of unified meaning. He provides a quick tour of American literature to show how this duplicity arises and is fostered. It seems strange to me, however, that Kuberski suggests Pound works against this duplicity. I feel that Pound attempts to increase the disturbances in linguistic meaning in order to activate psychological meanings. Kuberski comes from the standard perspective which holds that Pound's Imagism sought objectivity and scientific clarity above everything. I'm not so sure I agree. Instead, Pound seems to prize the insights that come from destabilization.

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.

Inauguration day: eager imagination

In reading for my orals exam this Fall 2009, I came across a quote from George Santayana that aptly encapsulates some of the ideas swirling through my reading:

"The idea of Christ himself had to be constructed by the imagination in response to moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external points of attachment. The facts were nothing until they became symbols; and nothing could turn them into symbols except an eager imagination on the watch for all that might embody its dreams."

I found this quote in Patricia Rae's The Practical Muse, a study of the poetics of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. She used the quote in a footnote to explain how Santayana's notion of poetic inspiration is different than William James's. According to Rae, Santayana is ultimately subjectivist in that he places the impetus for creative endeavor entirely in human desire, whereas James, the consummate pragmatist, contends that a declaration like Santayana's is dogmatic and denies the possibility of the divine.

I'm not interested in this discussion for its theological implications as much as what it has to say about the role of desire in poetry. As a psychoanalytic critic, I'm drawn to Santayana's perspective (and also perhaps because he writes so beautifully), but there are potential problems, as well. Rae critiques Santayana's position on the grounds that it promotes a notion of poetry (and art) as simple wish fulfillments or daydreams. I think it's important to reject that critique because it's tantamount to saying that the desires contained in daydreams are not of value. The manifestation of "eager imagination" is a crucial part of aesthetic production.

And by using the word "production" I might have tipped my hand. My main question about Santayana's perspective is whether or not he investigates how such desires are formed; that is, which social circumstances occasions the rise of particular desires. Which forces structure desire?

My oral exam paper hopes to examine these questions in relation to Ezra Pound's early poetry. The answers are still eluding me at this point, but that's why I started this blog. Hopefully, sustained written responses to my reading list will slowly force out some decent ideas on these topics.