I shall not lack conversation. Ezra Pound, whose art is the opposite of mine, whose criticism commends what I most condemn, a man with whom I should quarrel more than with anyone else if we were not united by affection, has for years lived in rooms opening onto a flat roof by the sea. For the last hour we have sat upon the roof which is also a garden, discussing that immense poem of which but seven and twenty Cantos are already published. I have often found there some scene of distinguished beauty but have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order. Now at last he explains that it will, when the hundredth Canto is finished, display a structure like that of a Bach Fugue. There will be no plot, no chronicle of events, no logic of discourse, but two themes, the descent into Hades from Homer, a metamorphosis from Ovid, and mixed with these mediaeval or modern historical characters. He has tried to produce that picture Porteous commended to Nicholas Poussin in ‘Le Chef d’oeuvre Inconnu’ ........
He has scribbled on the back of an envelope events—I cannot find any adequate definition—A B C D and then J K L M, and then each set of letters repeated, and then A B C D inverted and this repeated, and then a new element X Y Z, then certain letters... all set whirling together ........
or W. B. Yeats, A Packet for Ezra Pound, 1929
Pound called this “Yeats’ bloody paragraph” because of the obsession it induced in Pound’s readers over the chance of finding a fugue in The Cantos, something new by which they might be able to understand the poem. It’s no surprise; reading Yeats on the letters, A B C D etc., leaves you chasing after Pound. But it is as much down to Yeats’s lack of understanding as it is Pound’s premature schema, and taking the fugue from Yeats alone seems impossible.
Everything in this chapter of A Packet for Ezra Pound reads as a well-written diary, and the envelope stands out as a piece of ephemera Yeats is still hunched over while writing. But one salient thing slips in. “[I] have never discovered why all the suits could not be dealt out in some quite different order.” This sentence seems to have nothing to do with the rest; not any event nor other scene nor style of writing. The ‘metaphor’, suits and cards, appears nowhere else. This to me this appears to be the tail-wind of their conversation, the result of whatever Pound and Yeats were saying while sat in the garden. It is also the depth of Yeats’s understanding of Pound’s form. It isn’t the fugue, but instead Yeats accepting that Pound is laying things out particularly and not seeing why.
Let’s say Pound said “yes you can lay them out as you like.” It wouldn’t have left anything for Yeats to hold onto; Yeats who needs a foothold on Pound’s work whose “poetry is the opposite of mine”. So Pound says, “But when you lay them out like this...”
Maybe Yeats pushed an alternative and Pound hit back. Pound puts forward a scheme and the envelope becomes quickly jarbled. One fugue in 100 Cantos remained in the minds of the public.
30 years later and Pound writes
♥
♦
♣
♠
And
fifty
2
weeks
in
4
seasons
I think Yeats’s question was so good that it got on Pound’s mind that late on. Why couldn’t the cards be dealt out in some different order? It is a question of fate, but it is also a question of form. To lay a card upside down is form, and a manipulation of the expected (common in Pound).
“Some cook, some do not cook
some things cannot be altered”
Some things can’t be changed, like the fact of the seasons. But what Pound can change he does. He is pro-experimentation. His mantra, Make It New, pushes for daily exploration. If it’s new it’s not a waste, newness leads to newness, and one must create. Form is on Pound’s table. It isn’t an impossible expression, but an object to be toyed with. He tests it until it gives new ground. What exactly his fugue is or where it might be found I do not know. I am told I should probably worry about the Balzac, and I do wonder over the central band in the frescoes, but I think the schemes, structures, etc., whatever their purpose, all result from a playfulness which is at the core of learning. Yeats put good words to this attitude at a time when Pound was far too strict (“when the hundredth Canto is finished”), and Pound knew it. The bloody paragraph is not enough to create trust in the 100 Canto fugue, and Pound’s cursing probably supports its inexistence. Strictness in form harbours our mathematical approaches. Well-defined forms might make powerful devices. But the real value of form is something far greater.