Person:

Albright, Daniel

In June 2009 news appeared concerning a 33,000-year-old flute, found in a cave in southern Germany, made of the wing bone of a griffon vulture. The idea that the most profound art comes from the innermost recesses of the body was familiar to the Modernist poets, such as William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound. Yeats’s play The Herne’s Egg concerns a flute made from a heron’s thigh-bone, and Yeats liked the bone’s perspective on human life: in one poem wrote of looking at the bitter old world through a hole bored in a hare’s collar-bone, and in another poem he wrote, “He that sings a lasting song / Thinks in a marrow-bone.” Pound (a composer as well as a poet) also examined the deep resonances of flute music: in his opera Le testament, the brothel music is played by a nose flute, and in a number of his Chinese poems flutes play uncanny roles. For example, in his translation from Li Po, “The River Song,” the nightingales’ song mixes into the sound of the flute, as if artifice and nature had attained a perfect counterpoint, a metaphysical unison; and in Canto 90 the flute tone comes hoi chthonioi, a Greek term meaning “the earth-born”—as if it were the music of spirits of the underworld. For both Yeats and Pound, flute music is at once the most celestial, the most unearthly of sounds, and also the expression of the bloodiest, most carnal life.

Yeats worried that his poetry might be destroyed if he wandered too far down what he called the hodos chameliontos, the chameleon road, in which the imagination became so replete, overstimulated, that it kept producing images in such profusion that the images became unintelligible. In a number of passages deleted from his plays, we can see Yeats experimenting with these wild profusions of images. In the art historical writings he studied, Yeats found visual analogues to the hodos chameliontos in the world of Persian art.

If Modernism implies experimentation with the limits of art, shocks and thrills beyond all previous bounds, then, in the matter of poetic form, the Victorians were more Modernist than the Modernists themselves. As inventors of new stanza forms, transgressors of prosodic boundaries and explorers of new sonorities of verse, the Victorians were unsurpassable - the Modernist poets began their careers in a world in which the Victorians had already broken all the rules and developed strange and idiosyncratic new rules. It might be good to start this review of Modernist poetic form with a catalogue of some of the formal innovations of the nineteenth century, and their relation to the aesthetics of Modernism. / Scrutiny of rhyme / Rhyme has always been a somewhat dubious attribute of English poetry, partly because classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use it. Around 1603 Samuel Daniel felt he had to publish A Defence of Ryme, because Campion and others had attacked it; and Milton began Paradise Lost (1674) with a note defending the rhymelessness of his epic: he called rhyme 'to all judicious ears, triveal, and of no true musical delight'. By the nineteenth century the propriety of rhyming was no longer an issue - the canon of rhymed poetry was obviously too magnificent to be dispensed with - but poets kept experimenting with aspects of rhyme.

Here begins the great unwieldy poem, all light and mud, to which Ezra Pound devoted much of his life. It was the work of a poet too ambitious, too afraid of being cramped, to work according to a plan. Instead of a plan, Pound devised a strategy for creating a self-scrutinizing text, continually extending itself, ramifying outward, as it groped to comprehend its own prior meanings, to improvise new networks of connection, and to assimilate new material: a text shaped like a developing brain. New Cantos form themselves out of schemes to make sense of old Cantos: so the story of The Cantos comprises two intertwined stories, one concerning Pound's writing of the poem, the other concerning Pound's interpretations of what he had already written.