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.