L+Stout

=Ezra Pound= Ezra Pound was born to an assayer at the US Mint in Hailey, Idaho in 1885. At age fifteen, Ezra decided that he wanted to be a poet and he carried that goal with him to his undergraduate stay at the University of Pennsylvannia. Pound first tried poetry that was considered "decadent" and rebellious. Such behaviour was not looked kindly upon by the older establishment so Pound lost his first teaching job at Wabash College in Indiana shortly after receiving it. From there, he traveled Europe and was even secretary to William Butler Yeats for a while. Pound developed the imagism and vorticism movements which focused on presenting objects without the frill and fluff of elaborate and ornate descriptions.

Pound later became a supporter of Benito Mussolini because he felt that a strong leader and a hierarchical society was best. Serving the Italians during World War II, Pound produced anti-American propaganda. Once the Allied forces took Italk, Pound was arrested and held for treason, but was never tried because he was committed to an insane asylum. After his release, he returned to Italy and died in 1972 at the age of eight-seven.

To Whistler, American
//You also, our first great Had tried all ways; Tested and pried and worked in many fashions, And this much gives me heart to play the game.

Here is a part that's slight, and part gone wrong, And much of little movement, and some few Perfect as Durer! "In the Studio" and these two portraits, if I had my choice! And then these sketches in the mood of Greece?

You had your searches, your uncertainties, And this is good to know --- for us, I mean, Who bear the brunt of our America And try to wrench her impulse into art.

You were not always sure, not always set To hiding night or tuning "symphonies"; Had not one style from birth, but tried and pried and stretched and tampered with the media.

You and Abe Lincoln from that mass of dolts Show us there's chance at least of winning through.//

The poem is about a viewer to the Tate Gallery viewing paintings from Whistler. Several allusions are made comparing the painting process to that of other artists, such as Durer the German engraver and wood carver. The viewer expresses admiration for Whistler because of how he had experimented and tried different artistic styles.

The ambiguous section of the poem is the very end where Whistler and Abraham Lincoln are claimed to be separate from "that mass of dolts" and that they offer hope of "winning through." The poem suggests that the conflict is generating art to match America, or to "wrench her impulse into art." Ezra points out how Whistler even incorporated music and painting together by naming his works in musical terms such as "symphonies."

I viewed this poem as an expression of frustration on Pound's part. He was conflicted over two things: balancing his advocation for the latest in poetry and his desire for the old, and the treatment of poetry and the arts in America. The second half of the poem is nearly all concerning how Whistler's style changed over time and was the result of trial and experiment with media. In particular, Pound notes that Whistler "Had not one style from birth," showing that Whistler had managed to cope with advancing the field of painting and treading between the old and the new. Written in 1912, the poem came four years after Pound had moved to Europe from America. His move was the result of losing his teaching job and then deciding that America had no place for art. The poem could thus be a statement that there might still hope for art in the United States thanks to the efforts of Whistler.

Portrait d'une Femme[[image:http://goldsteinmedia.ci.fsu.edu/lawson/SargassoSea_1600.jpg width="319" height="474" align="right" caption="Ships abandoned in the Sargasso Sea"]]
//Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, London has swept about you this score years And bright ships left you this or that in fee: Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things, Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price. Great minds have sought you --- lacking someone else. You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind --- with one thought less, each year. Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit Hours, where something might have floated up. And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay. You are a person of some interest, one comes to you And takes strange gain away: Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion; Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two, Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else that might prove useful and yet never proves, That never fits a corner or shows use, Or finds its hour upon the loom of days: The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work; Idols and ambergris and rare inlays, There are your riches, your great store; and yet For all this sea-hoard of delicious things, Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff: In the slow float of differing light and deep, No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, Nothing that's quite your own. Yet this is you.//

The poem reads literally as a description of the Sargasso Sea, or a giant mass of seaweed in the ocean near London. The image is created of ships entering and leaving the Sargasso Sea in search of valuables. But the searches tend to end in false leads, and some things get left behind in the tangles. The poem itself is written in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter.

The ambiguities arise from trying to match the poem's title to its contents. The title claims it is a portrait of a lady, but the description is that of a dead area of water infested with seaweed. The common interpretation is that the lady is a hostess for a //salon// in London where thinkers can come to have discussions. The portrait Pound paints is very unflattering, calling the lady second rate at best, that people came to her only because they were "lacking someone else." The goods that have been left with her are the conversations and ideas discussed in the //salon//. In the end, however, she doesn't have anything original, there has been "Nothing that's quite [her] own" despite having lived in London for twenty years while great thinkers came and went.

My original attempt at figuring out the meaning of the poem was of a lover or mistress trying to catch and keep a suitor. The phrase "Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else that might prove useful and yet never proves" suggested a woman that tried lying about being pregnant, but that didn't work and the man still left. Since Pound was much more of a Modernist, the conventional interpretation makes much more sense.

A Pact
//I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman--- I have detested you long enough. I come to you as a grown child Who has had a pig-headed father; I am old enough now to make friends. It was you that broke the new wood, Now is a time for carving. We have one sap and one root--- Let there be commerce between us.//

The poem is a message from Pound to Walt Whitman that the animosity he had for Whitman was no more. It goes further to state that Pound wants to work with Whitman in some fashion, or have "commerce between us."

The ambiguity of the poem rests mainly in the question of why Pound detested Whitman. The poem itself is very straightforward - an admission that Pound wants to move forward now that he has matured, and an acknowledgement that Whitman has broken new ground that Pound can now work with. The dispute was over Whitman's unrefined language and structure of poems, and how Whitman had become associated as the voice of America. The poem was thus a statement that the messages both Whitman and Pound wanted to present are in fact the same, that they "have one sap and one root." After this, Pound worked more with and refined the "new wood" or free verse style of Whitman.

A prime example of Modernism, this poem had a very clear meaning that I picked out. The residual message from the poem to me was one of maturity. Pound mentions that he is "a grown child" that is ready to move on and work with someone he had disliked. Such turn arounds are not very common today.

In a Station of the Metro[[image:http://open.salon.com/files/396960108_2ae143471b1245290072.jpg width="289" height="191" align="right"]]
//The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.//

The poem describes an image of ghostly faces among a crowd of people at a subway station. It also uses the image of flower petals stuck to the black wood of a bough with water.

The ambiguity of the poem is seeing how the few words relate to each other and the title. The poem is a perfect example of the imagist movement Pound started. The goal of imagist poetry is to express an image and concept as concisely as possible, and omit the extra fluff and ornamentation of traditional poetry. In this case, the image is of a subway train rushing through the station. In the windows, the faces of the crowd are momentarily reflected, the blurred forms like ghostly visitors. These reflections in turn appear to be shaped like flower petals, stuck to the side of the black train as if held there by water droplets.

Comparing the length of this poem to the vivid image it produced for me made it stand out and was why I concentrated on Pound's work for this project. Once again, as a Modernist writer, Pound had a clear objective in mind for his work and that is the one I interpretted it as -- the fleeting image of faces against the side of a subway train. What makes the poem evoke such a strong response has to do with the term "apparition" appearing at the beginning. The word conveys an otherness to the image, that it is blurred and out of focus, and that it can disappear instantly. Just using the term reflection would have made the visual image fall flat.

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter[[image:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/49/132950119_e27f573c22.jpg width="400" height="299" align="right"]]
//While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead I played about the front gate, pulling flowers. You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse, You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums. And we went on living in the village of Chokan: Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you. I never laughed, being bashful. Lowering my head, I looked at the wall. Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling, I desired my dust to be mingled with yours Forever and forever and forever. Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed, You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies, And you have been gone for five months. The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out. By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses, Too deep to clear them away! The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind. The paird butterflies are already yellow with August Over the grass in the West garden; They hurt me. I grow older. If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang, Please let me know beforehand, And I will come out to meet you As far as Cho-fu-Sa.//

The original author of the poem was the Chinese poet Li Po, called Rihaku in the Japanese translation. Pound translated the Japanese version of the poem into English and applied his distinctive use of concise imagery to it.

The literal interpretation of the poem is of a young woman who has been left behind by her husband going on a merchant trip a year or two after being married. After his being away for five months, she is sad and anxious for his return.

There are several ambiguous places near the start of the poem. For example, who is calling the woman "a thousand times" and why does she not respond? It could be that she is acting in deference to her new husband, or she could be ignoring possible suitors. What was the purpose of her scowling before she turned fifteen? Was she reluctant to go through with the likely forced marriage? The phrase "Why should I climb the look out?" is also unclear. It likely means that she does not want to have to wait, watching in the look out, for her husband to return while he had already died at sea. The beauty of the imagery occurs in the last half of the poem. The passing of time is shown by how deep and varied the moss has become around the gate they first met at as kids. The arrival of fall is marked with the changed leaves and the yellow butterflies.

Reading the poem made me very sad; I imagined the scene from the perspective of my fiance if I left on a long voyage. The uncertainty the the woman's husband will ever return is gut wrenching for me. The scene plays out like a clock slowly ticking, slowly losing power until it comes to a stop.