Reminisces of an Old Man: The Poetic Side of Life

Ezra Pound

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The gift, which included income from five tenants, may have ended his career at the Treasury, or at least allowed him to give it less time and energy. By this time, he had attained the status of eques Romanus , [45] perhaps as a result of his work at the Treasury. Odes 1—3 were the next focus for his artistic creativity. He adapted their forms and themes from Greek lyric poetry of the seventh and sixth centuries BC.

The fragmented nature of the Greek world had enabled his literary heroes to express themselves freely and his semi-retirement from the Treasury in Rome to his own estate in the Sabine hills perhaps empowered him to some extent also [47] yet even when his lyrics touched on public affairs they reinforced the importance of private life. In the period 27—24 BC, political allusions in the Odes concentrated on foreign wars in Britain 1.

He greeted Augustus on his return to Rome in 24 BC as a beloved ruler upon whose good health he depended for his own happiness 3. The public reception of Odes 1—3 disappointed him however. He attributed the lack of success to jealousy among imperial courtiers and to his isolation from literary cliques. He addressed his first book of Epistles to a variety of friends and acquaintances in an urbane style reflecting his new social status as a knight.

In the opening poem, he professed a deeper interest in moral philosophy than poetry [50] but, though the collection demonstrates a leaning towards stoic theory, it reveals no sustained thinking about ethics. According to Suetonius, the second book of Epistles was prompted by Augustus, who desired a verse epistle to be addressed to himself.

Augustus was in fact a prolific letter-writer and he once asked Horace to be his personal secretary. Horace refused the secretarial role but complied with the emperor's request for a verse letter. It celebrated, among other things, the 15 BC military victories of his stepsons, Drusus and Tiberius, yet it and the following letter [56] were largely devoted to literary theory and criticism. The literary theme was explored still further in Ars Poetica , published separately but written in the form of an epistle and sometimes referred to as Epistles 2.

Suetonius recorded some gossip about Horace's sexual activities late in life, claiming that the walls of his bedchamber were covered with obscene pictures and mirrors, so that he saw erotica wherever he looked. Both men bequeathed their property to Augustus, an honour that the emperor expected of his friends. The dating of Horace's works isn't known precisely and scholars often debate the exact order in which they were first 'published'. There are persuasive arguments for the following chronology: Horace composed in traditional metres borrowed from Archaic Greece , employing hexameters in his Satires and Epistles , and iambs in his Epodes , all of which were relatively easy to adapt into Latin forms.

His Odes featured more complex measures, including alcaics and sapphics , which were sometimes a difficult fit for Latin structure and syntax. Despite these traditional metres, he presented himself as a partisan in the development of a new and sophisticated style. He was influenced in particular by Hellenistic aesthetics of brevity, elegance and polish, as modeled in the work of Callimachus. As soon as Horace, stirred by his own genius and encouraged by the example of Virgil, Varius, and perhaps some other poets of the same generation, had determined to make his fame as a poet, being by temperament a fighter, he wanted to fight against all kinds of prejudice, amateurish slovenliness, philistinism, reactionary tendencies, in short to fight for the new and noble type of poetry which he and his friends were endeavouring to bring about.

In modern literary theory, a distinction is often made between immediate personal experience Urerlebnis and experience mediated by cultural vectors such as literature, philosophy and the visual arts Bildungserlebnis. Though elitist in its literary standards, it was written for a wide audience, as a public form of art.

Horace generally followed the examples of poets established as classics in different genres, such as Archilochus in the Epodes , Lucilius in the Satires and Alcaeus in the Odes , later broadening his scope for the sake of variation and because his models weren't actually suited to the realities confronting him. Archilochus and Alcaeus were aristocratic Greeks whose poetry had a social and religious function that was immediately intelligible to their audiences but which became a mere artifice or literary motif when transposed to Rome.

However, the artifice of the Odes is also integral to their success, since they could now accommodate a wide range of emotional effects, and the blend of Greek and Roman elements adds a sense of detachment and universality. It was no idle boast. His Epodes were modeled on the verses of the Greek poet, as 'blame poetry', yet he avoided targeting real scapegoats. Whereas Archilochus presented himself as a serious and vigorous opponent of wrong-doers, Horace aimed for comic effects and adopted the persona of a weak and ineffectual critic of his times as symbolized for example in his surrender to the witch Canidia in the final epode.

He imitated other Greek lyric poets as well, employing a 'motto' technique, beginning each ode with some reference to a Greek original and then diverging from it. The satirical poet Lucilius was a senator's son who could castigate his peers with impunity. Horace was a mere freedman's son who had to tread carefully. His work expressed genuine freedom or libertas. His style included 'metrical vandalism' and looseness of structure. Horace instead adopted an oblique and ironic style of satire, ridiculing stock characters and anonymous targets.

His libertas was the private freedom of a philosophical outlook, not a political or social privilege. The Epistles may be considered among Horace's most innovative works. There was nothing like it in Greek or Roman literature. Occasionally poems had had some resemblance to letters, including an elegiac poem from Solon to Mimnermus and some lyrical poems from Pindar to Hieron of Syracuse.

Lucilius had composed a satire in the form of a letter, and some epistolary poems were composed by Catullus and Propertius. But nobody before Horace had ever composed an entire collection of verse letters, [73] let alone letters with a focus on philosophical problems. The sophisticated and flexible style that he had developed in his Satires was adapted to the more serious needs of this new genre.

His craftsmanship as a wordsmith is apparent even in his earliest attempts at this or that kind of poetry, but his handling of each genre tended to improve over time as he adapted it to his own needs. Nevertheless, the first book includes some of his most popular poems. Horace developed a number of inter-related themes throughout his poetic career, including politics, love, philosophy and ethics, his own social role, as well as poetry itself. His Epodes and Satires are forms of 'blame poetry' and both have a natural affinity with the moralising and diatribes of Cynicism. This often takes the form of allusions to the work and philosophy of Bion of Borysthenes [nb 13] but it is as much a literary game as a philosophical alignment.

By the time he composed his Epistles , he was a critic of Cynicism along with all impractical and "high-falutin" philosophy in general. Over time, he becomes more confident about his political voice. Epicureanism is the dominant influence, characterizing about twice as many of these odes as Stoicism.

A group of odes combines these two influences in tense relationships, such as Odes 1. While generally favouring the Epicurean lifestyle, the lyric poet is as eclectic as the satiric poet, and in Odes 2. This book shows greater poetic confidence after the public performance of his "Carmen saeculare" or "Century hymn" at a public festival orchestrated by Augustus. In it, Horace addresses the emperor Augustus directly with more confidence and proclaims his power to grant poetic immortality to those he praises. It is the least philosophical collection of his verses, excepting the twelfth ode, addressed to the dead Virgil as if he were living.

In that ode, the epic poet and the lyric poet are aligned with Stoicism and Epicureanism respectively, in a mood of bitter-sweet pathos. What is true and what befits is my care, this my question, this my whole concern. Ambiguity is the hallmark of the Epistles. It is uncertain if those being addressed by the self-mocking poet-philosopher are being honoured or criticized. Though he emerges as an Epicurean, it is on the understanding that philosophical preferences, like political and social choices, are a matter of personal taste.

Thus he depicts the ups and downs of the philosophical life more realistically than do most philosophers. The reception of Horace's work has varied from one epoch to another and varied markedly even in his own lifetime. Odes 1—3 were not well received when first 'published' in Rome, yet Augustus later commissioned a ceremonial ode for the Centennial Games in 17 BC and also encouraged the publication of Odes 4, after which Horace's reputation as Rome's premier lyricist was assured.

His Odes were to become the best received of all his poems in ancient times, acquiring a classic status that discouraged imitation: In a verse epistle to Augustus Epistle 2. For one modern scholar, however, Horace's personal qualities are more notable than the monumental quality of his achievement:. We think rather of a voice which varies in tone and resonance but is always recognizable, and which by its unsentimental humanity evokes a very special blend of liking and respect. Yet for men like Wilfred Owen , scarred by experiences of World War I, his poetry stood for discredited values:.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. The same motto, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori , had been adapted to the ethos of martyrdom in the lyrics of early Christian poets like Prudentius. These preliminary comments touch on a small sample of developments in the reception of Horace's work.

More developments are covered epoch by epoch in the following sections. Horace's influence can be observed in the work of his near contemporaries, Ovid and Propertius. Ovid followed his example in creating a completely natural style of expression in hexameter verse, and Propertius cheekily mimicked him in his third book of elegies.

His influence had a perverse aspect. As mentioned before, the brilliance of his Odes may have discouraged imitation. Conversely, they may have created a vogue for the lyrics of the archaic Greek poet Pindar , due to the fact that Horace had neglected that style of lyric see Pindar Influence and legacy. Ovid's Ibis was a rare attempt at the form but it was inspired mainly by Callimachus , and there are some iambic elements in Martial but the main influence there was Catullus. Both Horace and Lucilius were considered good role-models by Persius , who critiqued his own satires as lacking both the acerbity of Lucillius and the gentler touch of Horace.

Statius paid homage to Horace by composing one poem in Sapphic and one in Alcaic meter the verse forms most often associated with Odes , which he included in his collection of occasional poems, Silvae. Ancient scholars wrote commentaries on the lyric meters of the Odes , including the scholarly poet Caesius Bassus. The politics apart, Pound needed the money; his father's pension payments had stopped—his father died in February in Rapallo—and Pound had his mother and Dorothy to look after.

The broadcasts were monitored by the United States Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service listening station at Princeton University , and in July Pound was indicted in absentia for treason. He answered the charge by writing a letter to Attorney General Francis Biddle , which Tytell describes as "long, reasoned, and temperate", defending his right to free speech. The war years threw Pound's domestic arrangements into disarray. Olga lost possession of her house in Venice and took a small house with Mary above Rapallo at Sant' Ambrogio. His mother's apartment was too small, and the couple moved in with Olga.

Mary, then 19 and finished with convent school, was quickly sent back to Gais in Switzerland, leaving Pound, as she would later write, "pent up with two women who loved him, whom he loved, and who coldly hated each other. Pound was in Rome early in September when Italy surrendered. He borrowed a pair of hiking boots and a knapsack and left the city, having finally decided to tell Mary about his wife and son. Heading north, he spent a night in an air-raid shelter in Bologna, then took a train to Verona and walked the rest of the way; he apparently traveled over miles in all. Mary almost failed to recognize him when he arrived, he was so dirty and tired.

He told her everything about his other family; she later admitted she felt more pity than anger. He returned home to Rapallo, where on 3 May , four days after Mussolini was shot, armed partisans arrived at the house to find Pound alone. He stuffed a copy of Confucius and a Chinese dictionary in his pocket before he was taken to their headquarters in Chiavari. He was released shortly afterwards, then with Olga gave himself up to an American military post in the nearby town of Lavagna. Pound was transferred to U.

Amprin, an FBI agent assigned by J. Pound asked to send a cable to President Truman to offer to help negotiate peace with Japan. He also asked to be allowed a final broadcast, a script called "Ashes of Europe Calling", in which he recommended peace with Japan, American management of Italy, the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, and leniency toward Germany. His requests were denied and the script was forwarded to Hoover.

On 8 May, the day Germany surrendered, Pound told an American reporter, Ed Johnston, that Hitler was "a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint", and that Mussolini was an "imperfect character who lost his head".

Pound spent three weeks in isolation in the heat, sleeping on the concrete, denied exercise and communication, except for conversations with the chaplain. After two and a half weeks he began to break down under the strain. On 14 and 15 June he was examined by psychiatrists, one of whom found symptoms of a mental breakdown, after which he was transferred to his own tent and allowed reading material. He began to write, drafting what became known as The Pisan Cantos. On 15 November Pound was transferred to the United States.

An escorting officer's impression was that "he is an intellectual 'crackpot' who imagined that he could correct all the economic ills of the world and who resented the fact that ordinary mortals were not sufficiently intelligent to understand his aims and motives". The charges included broadcasting for the enemy, attempting to persuade American citizens to undermine government support of the war, and strengthening morale in Italy against the United States.

He was admitted to St. Elizabeths Hospital , and in June the following year Dorothy was declared his legal guardian. He was held for a time in the hospital's prison ward—Howard's Hall, known as the "hell-hole", a building without windows—in a room with a thick steel door and nine peepholes to allow the psychiatrists to observe him as they tried to agree on a diagnosis.

Visitors were admitted for only 15 minutes at a time, while patients wandered around screaming and frothing at the mouth. Pound's lawyer, Julien Cornell , whose efforts to have him declared insane are credited with having saved him from life imprisonment, requested his release at a bail hearing in January Kutler believes that Overholser protected Pound from the criminal justice system because he was fascinated by him. Tytell writes that Pound was in his element in Chestnut Ward. He was at last provided for, and was allowed to read, write and receive visitors, including Dorothy for several hours a day.

He took over a small alcove with wicker chairs just outside his room, and turned it into his private living room, where he entertained his friends and important literary figures. It reached the point where he refused to discuss any attempt to have him released. Olga Rudge visited him twice, once in and again in , and was unable to convince him to be more assertive about his release. She wrote to a friend: Is there a blacker or was it merely San Juan with a belly ache writing ad posteros in short shall we look for a deeper or is this the bottom?

A group of Pound's friends—Eliot, Cummings, W. Pound responded to the award with "No comment from the bughouse. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette quoted critics who said "poetry [cannot] convert words into maggots that eat at human dignity and still be good poetry". Robert Hillyer , a Pulitzer Prize winner and president of the Poetry Society of America, attacked the committee in The Saturday Review of Literature , telling journalists that he "never saw anything to admire in Pound, not one line". Javits demanded an investigation into the awards committee.

It was the last time the prize was administered by the Library of Congress. Although Pound repudiated his antisemitism in public, he maintained his views in private. He refused to talk to psychiatrists with Jewish-sounding names, dismissed people he disliked as "Jews", and urged visitors to read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , a forgery claiming to represent a Jewish plan for world domination. Even more damaging was his friendship with John Kasper , a far-right activist and Ku Klux Klan member. Kasper had come to admire Pound during literature classes at university, and after he wrote to Pound in the two had become friends.

Kasper opened a bookstore in Greenwich Village in called "Make it New", reflecting his commitment to Pound's ideas; the store specialized in far-right material, including Nazi literature, and Pound's poetry and translations were displayed on the window front.

Sullivan and the writer Guy Davenport , but it was the association with Mullins and Kasper that stood out and delayed his release from St Elizabeths. Pound's friends continued to try to get him out. Shortly after Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in Literature in , he told Time magazine that "this would be a good year to release poets". He was also questioned relating to the bombing of the school. Several publications began campaigning for Pound's release in In MacLeish hired Thurman Arnold , a prestigious lawyer who ended up charging no fee, to file a motion to dismiss the indictment.

Overholser, the hospital's superintendent, supported the application with an affidavit saying Pound was permanently and incurably insane, and that confinement served no therapeutic purpose. The Department of Justice did not oppose the motion, and Pound was free. Pound arrived in Naples in July , where he was photographed giving a fascist salute to the waiting press. When asked when he had been released from the mental hospital, he replied: When I left the hospital I was still in America, and all America is an insane asylum.

They were accompanied by a teacher Pound had met in hospital, Marcella Spann, 40 years his junior, ostensibly acting as his secretary and collecting poems for an anthology. By December , Pound was mired in depression. He saw his work as worthless and The Cantos botched. He paced up and down during the three days it took to complete the interview, never finishing a sentence, bursting with energy one minute, then suddenly sagging, and at one point seemed about to collapse.

Hall said it was clear that he "doubted the value of everything he had done in his life". Those close to him thought he was suffering from dementia, and in mid, Mary placed him in a clinic near Merano when his weight dropped. He picked up again, but by early he had a urinary infection. Dorothy felt unable to look after him, so he went to live with Olga in Rapallo, then Venice; Dorothy mostly stayed in London after that with Omar.

Pound attended a neo-Fascist May Day parade in , but his health continued to decline. The following year he told an interviewer, Grazia Levi: I have always blundered All my life I believed I knew nothing, yes, knew nothing. And so words became devoid of meaning. William Carlos Williams died in , followed by Eliot in Pound went to Eliot's funeral in London and on to Dublin to visit Yeats's widow.

Two years later he went to New York where he attended the opening of an exhibition featuring his blue-inked version of Eliot's The Waste Land. Shortly before his death in it was proposed that he be awarded the Emerson-Thoreau Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, but after a storm of protest the academy's council opposed it by 13 to 9.

The sociologist Daniel Bell , who was on the committee, argued that it was important to distinguish between those who explore hate and those who approve it. On his 87th birthday, 30 October , he was too weak to leave his bedroom. The next night he was admitted to the Civil Hospital of Venice, where he died in his sleep of an intestinal blockage on 1 November, with Olga at his side. Dorothy was unable to travel to the funeral. Four gondoliers dressed in black rowed the body to the island cemetery, Isola di San Michele , where he was buried near Diaghilev and Stravinsky.

Olga died in and was buried next to Pound. Critics generally agree that Pound was a strong yet subtle lyricist, particularly in his early work, such as "The River Merchant's Wife". Drawing on literature from a variety of disciplines, Pound intentionally layered often confusing juxtapositions, yet led the reader to an intended conclusion, believing the "thoughtful man" would apply a sense of organization and uncover the underlying symbolism and structure.

Pound's relationship to music is essential to his poetry. Although he was tone deaf and his speaking voice is described as "raucous, nasal, scratchy", Michael Ingam writes that Pound is on a short list of poets possessed of a sense of sound, an "ear" for words, imbuing his poetry with melopoeia. He goes on to write that Pound's use of counterpoint is integral to the structure and cohesion of The Cantos , which show multi-voiced counterpoint and, with the juxtaposition of images, non-linear themes. The pieces are presented in fragments "which taken together, can be seen to unfold in time as music does".

Opinion varies about the nature of Pound's writing style. Nadel writes that imagism was to change Pound's poetry. Pound's translations represent a substantial part of his work. He began his career with translations of Occitan ballads and ended with translations of Egyptian poetry. Yao says the body of translations by modernist poets in general, much of which Pound started, consists of some the most "significant modernist achievements in English".

The fullness of the achievement for the modernists is that they renewed interest in multiculturalism, multilingualism, and, perhaps of greater importance, they treated translations not in a strict sense of the word but instead saw a translation as the creation of an original work. Michael Alexander writes that, as a translator, Pound was a pioneer with a great gift of language and an incisive intelligence.

He revived interest in the Confucian classics and introduced the west to classical Japanese poetry and drama.

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He translated and championed Greek, Latin and Anglo-Saxon classics, and helped keep them alive at a time when poets no longer considered translations central to their craft. In Pound's Fenollosa translations, unlike previous American translators of Chinese poetry, which tended to work with strict metrical and stanzaic patterns, Pound created free verse translations. Whether the poems are valuable as translations continues to be a source of controversy. The real achievement of the book, Kenner argues, is in how it combines meditations on violence and friendship with an effort to "rethink the nature of an English poem".

These ostensible translations of ancient Eastern texts, Kenner argues, are actually experiments in English poetics and compelling elegies for a warring West. And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea til day's end. The Cantos is difficult to decipher. In the epic poem, Pound disregards literary genres, mixing satire, hymns, elegies , essays and memoirs. Pound reaches across cultures and time periods, assembling and juxtaposing "themes and history" from Homer to Ovid and Dante , from Thomas Jefferson and John Adams , and many others. The work presents a multitude of protagonists as "travellers between nations".

The nature of The Cantos , she says, is to compare and measure among historical periods and cultures and against "a Poundian standard" of modernism. Pound layered ideas, cultures and historical periods, writing in as many as 15 different languages, using modern vernacular , Classical languages and Chinese ideograms.

It functions as a contemporary memoir, in which "personal history [and] lyrical retrospection mingle"—most clearly represented in the Pisan Cantos. Allen Tate believes the poem is not about anything and is without beginning, middle or end. He argues that Pound was incapable of sustained thought and "at the mercy of random flights of 'angelic insight,' an Icarian self-indulgence of prejudice which is not checked by a total view to which it could be subordinated".

Pound's literary criticism and essays are, according to Massimo Bacigalupo , a "form of intellectual journal". The former piece was to "remain one of Pound's principal sourcebooks for his poetry"; in the latter he introduces the concept of "luminous details". These were followed by The Guide to Kulchur , covering years of history, which Tim Redman describes as the "most complete synthesis of Pound's political and economic thought". He rejected traditional rhetoric and created his own, although not very successfully, in Coats's view. In , the literary critic Edmund Wilson reviewed Pound's latest published volume of poetry, Poems —21 , and took the opportunity to provide an overview of his estimation of Pound as poet.

Ezra Pound is really at heart a very boyish fellow and an incurable provincial. It is true that he was driven to Europe by a thirst for romance and color that he could scarcely have satisfied in America, but he took to Europe the simple faith and pure enthusiasm of his native Idaho. His sophistication is still juvenile, his ironies are still clumsy and obvious, he ridicules Americans in Europe not very much simpler than himself According to Wilson, the lines in Pound's poems stood isolated, with fragmentary wording contributing to poems that "do not hang together".

Citing Pound's first seven cantos, Wilson dubbed the writing "unsatisfactory". He found The Cantos disjointed and its contents reflecting a too-obvious reliance on the literary works of other authors, and an awkward use of Latin and Chinese translations as a device inserted among reminiscences of Pound's own life. The rise of New Criticism during the s, in which author is separated from text, secured Pound's poetic reputation. Eliot's Literary Essays in "initiated the recuperation of Ezra Pound".

Eliot's essays coincided with the work of Hugh Kenner , who visited Pound extensively at St. Following Mullins' biography, described by Nadel as "partisan" and "melodramatic", was Noel Stock's factual Life of Ezra Pound , although the material included was subject to Dorothy's approval. The s saw three significant biographies: John Tytell 's "neutral" account in , followed by Wilhelm's multi-volume biography. Humphrey Carpenter 's sprawling narrative, a "complete life", built on what Stock began; unlike Stock, Carpenter had the benefit of working without intervention from Pound's relatives.

In David Moody published the first of his multi-volume biography, combining narrative with literary criticism, the first work to link the two. Tim Redman writes about Pound's fascism and his relationship with Mussolini, and Leon Surrette about Pound's economic theories, especially during the Italian period, investigating how Pound the poet became Pound the fascist. He emphasized that Pound's "economic and political opinions have not been properly dated, nor has the suddenness of his radicalization been appreciated".

Nadel's Pound in Context is a contextual literary approach to Pound scholarship. Pound's life, "the social, political, historical, and literary developments of his period", is fully investigated, which, according to Nadel is "the grid for reading Pound's poetry". Pound helped advance the careers of some of the best-known modernist writers of the early 20th century.

He may be named only to be cursed as wanton and mocker, poseur, trifler and vagrant. Or he may be classed as filling a niche today like that of Keats in a preceding epoch. The point is, he will be mentioned. I have tried to write Paradise Do not move Let the wind speak. The outrage after Pound's wartime collaboration with Mussolini's regime was so deep that the imagined method of his execution dominated the discussion.

Arthur Miller considered him worse than Hitler: Macha Rosenthal wrote that it was "as if all the beautiful vitality and all the brilliant rottenness of our heritage in its luxuriant variety were both at once made manifest" in Ezra Pound. Pound's antisemitism has soured evaluation of his poetry. Pound scholar Wendy Stallard Flory writes that separating the poetry from the antisemitism is perceived as apologetic.

She believes the positioning of Pound as "National Monster" and "designated fascist intellectual" made him a stand-in for the silent majority in Germany, occupied France and Belgium, as well as Britain and the United States, who, she argues, made the Holocaust possible by aiding or standing by. Later in his life, Pound analyzed what he judged to be his own failings as a writer attributable to his adherence to ideological fallacies. Ginsberg reassured Pound that he "had shown us the way", but Pound refused to be mollified:.

Then very slowly, with emphasis, surely conscious of Ginsberg's being Jewish: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the author who wrote under the pen-name William Atheling, Jr. American poet and critic. In a Station of the Metro. The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. Le Testament de Villon. You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, and you yourselves out-jewed the Jew.

Allied invasion of Italy. Pound spent three weeks in an outdoor steel cage in Pisa. List of cultural references in The Cantos. Privately printed by A. Pollock, London; and Elkin Mathews , London, poems. Elkin Mathews, London, poems. Dent , London, prose. Small, Maynard, Boston, poems. Swift, London, poems; first announcement of Imagism Cathay. Elkin Mathews, poems; translations Gaudier-Brzeska.

John Lane , London, prose. A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan. Macmillan, London, Lustra. Your supposed Biography entertained me much. I could give you the other side. I was amusing myself this spring by writing an account of the insane poet, painter, and engraver, Blake. Malkin having in his Memoirs of his son given an account of this extraordinary genius with specimens of his poems, I resolved out of these to compile a paper.

And this I did, [9] and the paper was translated by Dr. Julius, who, many years afterwards, introduced himself to me as my translator. But before I drew up the paper, I went to see a gallery of Blake's paintings, which were exhibited by his brother, a hosier in Carnaby Market. The entrance was 2s.

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I was deeply interested by the catalogue as well as the pictures. I took 4—telling the brother I hoped he would let me come in again. I afterwards became acquainted with Blake, and will postpone till hereafter what I have to say of this extraordinary character, whose life has since been written very inadequately by Allan Cunningham in his Lives of the English Artists. What I have written about Blake will appear at the end of the year It was at the latter end of the year that I put in writing my recollections of this most remarkable man. The larger portions are under the date of the 18th of December.

He died in the year I have therefore now revised what I wrote on the 10th of December and afterwards, and without any attempt to reduce to order, or make consistent the wild and strange rhapsodies uttered by this insane man of genius, thinking it better to put down what I find as it occurs, though I am aware of the objection that may justly be made to the recording the ravings of insanity in which it may be said there can be found no principle, as there is no ascertainable law of mental association which is obeyed; and from which therefore nothing can be learned.

I have written a few sentences in these reminiscences already, those of the year I had not then begun the regular journal which I afterwards kept. I will therefore go over the ground again and introduce these recollections of by a reference to the slight knowledge I had of him before, and what occasioned my taking an interest in him, not caring to repeat what Cunningham has recorded of him in the volume of his Lives of the British Painters , etc. It appears that he was born. Malkin , our Bury Grammar School Headmaster, published in the year a Memoir of a very precocious child who died. I knew that Flaxman thought highly of him, and though he did not venture to extol him as a genuine seer, yet he did not join in the ordinary derision of him as a madman.

Without having seen him, yet I had already conceived a high opinion of him, and thought he would furnish matter for a paper interesting to Germans, and therefore when Fred. Perthes , the patriotic publisher at Hamburg, wrote to me in requesting me to give him an article for his Patriotische Annalen, I thought I could do no better than send him a paper on Blake, which was translated into German by Dr. Julius , filling, with a few small poems copied and translated, 24 pages. These appeared in the first and last No. The high-minded editor boldly declared that as the Emperor of France had annexed Hamburg to France he had no longer a country, and there could no longer be any patriotical Annals!

Perthes' Life has been written since, which I have not seen. I am told there is in it a civil mention of me. Julius introduced himself to me as such translator a few years ago. In order to enable me to write this paper, which, by the bye, has nothing in it of the least value, I went to see an exhibition of Blake's original paintings in Carnaby Market, at a hosier's, Blake's brother.

These paintings filled several rooms of an ordinary dwelling-house, and for the sight a half-crown was demanded of the visitor, for which he had a catalogue. This catalogue I possess, and it is a very curious exposure of the state of the artist's mind. I wished to send it to Germany and to give a copy to Lamb and others, so I took four, and giving 10s. Lamb was delighted with the catalogue, especially with the description of a painting afterwards engraved, and connected with which is an anecdote that, unexplained, would reflect discredit on a most amiable and excellent man, but which Flaxman considered to have been not the wilful act of Stodart.

It was after the friends of Blake had circulated a subscription paper for an engraving of his Canterbury Pilgrims , that Stodart was made a party to an engraving of a painting of the same subject by himself. Stodart's work is well known, Blake's is known by very few. Lamb preferred it greatly to Stodart's, and declared that Blake's description was the finest criticism he had ever read of Chaucer's poem. In this catalogue Blake writes of himself in the most outrageous language—says, 'This artist defies all competition in colouring'—that none can beat him, for none can beat the Holy Ghost—that he and Raphael and Michael Angelo were under divine influence—while Corregio and Titian worshipped a lascivious and therefore cruel deity—Reubens a proud devil, etc.

He declared, speaking of colour, Titian's men to be of leather and his women of chalk, and ascribed his own perfection in colouring to the advantage he enjoyed in seeing daily the primitive men walking in their native nakedness in the mountains of Wales. There were about thirty oil-paintings, the colouring excessively dark and high, the veins black, and the colour of the primitive men very like that of the Red Indians.

In his estimation they would probably be the primitive men. Many of his designs were unconscious imitations. This appears also in his published works—the designs of Blair 's Grave , which Fuseli and Schiavonetti highly extolled—and in his designs to illustrate Job , published after his death for the benefit of his widow.

To this catalogue and in the printed poems, the small pamphlet which appeared in , the edition put forth by Wilkinson of 'The Songs of Innocence,' and other works already mentioned, to which I have to add the first four books of Young's Night Thoughts , and Allan Cunningham 's Life of him, I now refer, and will confine myself to the memorandums I took of his conversation.

I had heard of him from Flaxman, and for the first time dined in his company at the Aders'. Linnell the painter also was there—an artist of considerable talent, and who professed to take [11] a deep interest in Blake and his work, whether of a perfectly disinterested character may be doubtful, as will appear hereafter. This was on the 10th of December. I was aware of his idiosyncracies and therefore to a great degree prepared for the sort of conversation which took place at and after dinner, an altogether unmethodical rhapsody on art, poetry, and religion—he saying the most strange things in the most unemphatic manner, speaking of his Visions as any man would of the most ordinary occurrence.

He was then 68 years of age. He had a broad, pale face, a large full eye with a benignant expression—at the same time a look of languor, [12] except when excited, and then he had an air of inspiration. But not such as without a previous acquaintance with him, or attending to what he said, would suggest the notion that he was insane. There was nothing wild about his look, and though very ready to be drawn out to the assertion of his favourite ideas, yet with no warmth as if he wanted to make proselytes. Indeed one of the peculiar features of his scheme, as far as it was consistent, was indifference and a very extraordinary degree of tolerance and satisfaction with what had taken place.

But at the same time that he was very ready to praise he seemed incapable of envy, as he was of discontent. He warmly praised some composition of Mrs. Aders, and having brought for Aders an engraving of his Canterbury Pilgrims, he remarked that one of the figures resembled a figure in one of the works then in Aders's room, so that he had been accused of having stolen from it. But he added that he had drawn the figure in question 20 years before he had seen the original picture. However, there is 'no wonder in the resemblance, as in my youth I was always studying that class of painting.

This was somewhat at variance with what he said both this day and afterwards—implying that he copies his Visions. And it was on this first day that, in answer to a question from me, he said, ' The Spirits told me.

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Socrates used pretty much the same language. He spoke of his Genius. Now, what affinity or resemblance do you suppose was there between the Genius which inspired Socrates and your Spirits? He smiled, and for once it seemed to me as if he had a feeling of vanity gratified. His eye brightened on my saying this. We are all coexistent with God; members of the Divine body, and partakers of the Divine nature.

It is hard on bringing together these fragmentary recollections [15] to fix Blake's position in relation to Christianity, Platonism, and Spinozism. It is one of the subtle remarks of Hume on the tendency of certain religious notions to reconcile us to whatever occurs, as God's will. And apply-this to something Blake said, and drawing the inference that there is no use in education, he hastily rejoined: It is the great Sin. It is eating of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil. That was the fault of Plato: Everything is good in God's eyes. He spoke with seeming complacency of his own life in connection with Art.

In becoming an artist he 'acted by command. Angelo or Raphael, in their day, or Mr. Flaxman, does any of his fine things, he does them in the Spirit. I want nothing—I am quite happy. His distinction between the Natural and Spiritual worlds was very confused. Incidentally, Swedenborg was mentioned—he declared him to be a Divine Teacher. He had done, and would do, much good. Yet he did wrong in endeavouring to explain to the reason what it could not comprehend.

He seemed to consider, but that was not clear, the visions of Swedenborg and Dante as of the same kind.

Vernon Scannell

Dante was the greater poet. He too was wrong in occupying his mind about political objects. Yet this did not appear to affect his estimation of Dante's genius, or his opinion of the truth of Dante's visions. Indeed, when he even declared Dante to be an Atheist, it was accompanied by expression of the highest admiration; though, said he, Dante saw Devils where I saw none. I put down in my journal the following insulated remarks. Michael Angelo could not have surpassed them.

I saw nothing but good in Calvin's house. In Luther's there were Harlots. He declared his opinion that the earth is flat, not round, and just as I had objected the circumnavigation dinner was announced. But objections were seldom of any use. The wildest of his assertions was made with the veriest indifference of tone, [18] as if altogether insignificant.

It respected the natural and spiritual worlds. By way of example of the difference between them, he said, ' You never saw the spiritual Sun. I saw him on Primrose Hill. Not everything was thus absurd. There were glimpses and flashes of truth and beauty: That is a wise tale of the Mahometans—of the Angel of the Lord who murdered the Infant. And when he joined to the assurance of his happiness, that of his having suffered, and that it was necessary, he added, 'There is suffering in Heaven; for where there is the capacity of enjoyment, there is the capacity of pain.

I include among the glimpses of truth this assertion, 'I know what is true by internal conviction. A doctrine is stated. My heart tells me It must be true. After my first evening with him at Aders's, I made the remark in my journal, that his observations, apart from his Visions and references to the spiritual world, were sensible and acute. In the sweetness of his countenance and gentility of his manner he added an indescribable grace to his conversation.

I added my regret, which I must now repeat, at my inability to give more than incoherent thoughts. Not altogether my fault perhaps. On the 17th I called on him in his house in Fountain's Court in the Strand. The interview was a short one, and what I saw was more remarkable than what I heard. He was at work engraving in a small bedroom, light, and looking out on a mean yard.

Everything in the room squalid and indicating poverty, except himself. And there was a natural gentility about him, and an insensibility to the seeming poverty, which quite removed the impression. Besides, his linen was clean, his hand white, and his air quite unembarrassed when he begged me to sit down as if he were in a palace. There was but one chair in the room besides that on which he sat.

On my putting my hand to it, I found that it would have fallen to pieces if I had lifted it, so, as if I had been a Sybarite, I said with a smile, 'Will you let me indulge myself? His wife I saw at this time, and she seemed to be the very woman to make him happy.

Interviews and Reminiscences

She had been formed by him. Indeed, otherwise, she could not have lived with him. Notwithstanding her dress, which was poor and dirty, she had a good expression in her countenance, and, with a dark eye, had remains [21] of beauty in her youth. She had that virtue of virtues in a wife, an implicit reverence of her husband. It is quite certain that she believed in all his visions.

And on one occasion, not this day, speaking of his Visions, she said, ' You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the window and set you a-screaming. He being to her what God was to him. Vide Milton's Paradise Lost— passim. He was making designs or engravings, I forget which. Carey's Dante was before [ sic ]. He showed me some of his designs from Dante, of which I do not presume to speak.

They were too much above me. They are in the hands of Linnell the painter, and, it has been suggested, are reserved by him for publication when Blake may have become [22] an object of interest to a greater number than he could be at this age. Dante was again the subject of our conversation. And Blake declared him a mere politician and atheist, busied about this world's affairs; as Milton was till, in his M.

And yet he afterwards spoke of Dante's being then with God. I was more successful when he also called Locke an atheist, and imputed to him wilful deception, and seemed satisfied with my admission, that Locke's philosophy led to the Atheism of the French school. He reiterated his former strange notions on morals—would allow of no other education than what lies in the cultivation of the fine arts and the imagination.

And he was silent to the observation that his doctrine denied evil. And said expressly said [ sic ] he did not believe in the omnipotence of God. The language of the Bible is only poetical or allegorical on the subject, yet he at the same time denied the reality of the natural world. Satan's empire is the empire of nothing. As he spoke of frequently seeing Milton, I ventured to ask, half ashamed at the time, which of the three or four portraits in Hollis's Memoirs vols. He answered, 'They are all like, at different ages. I have seen him as a youth and as an old man with a long flowing beard.

He came lately as an old man—he said he came to ask a favour of me. He said he had committed an error in his Paradise Lost, which he wanted me to correct, in a poem or picture; but I declined. I said I had my own duties to perform. Now that cannot be, for no good can spring out of evil. To this he answered by a reference to the androgynous state, in which I could not possibly follow him. At the time that he asserted his own possession of this gift of Vision, he did not boast of it as peculiar to himself; all men might have it if they would.

On the 24th I called a second time on him. And on this occasion it was that I read to him Wordsworth's Ode on the supposed pre-existent State, and the subject of Wordsworth's religious character was discussed when we met on the 18th of Feb. I will here bring together Blake's declarations concerning Wordsworth, and set down his marginalia in the 8vo. I had been in the habit, when reading this marvellous Ode to friends, to omit one or two passages, especially that beginning:.

Not that I acknowledged this to be a fair test. But with Blake I could fear nothing of the kind. And it was this very stanza which threw him almost into a hysterical rapture. His delight in Wordsworth's poetry was intense. The combination of the warmest praise with imputations which from another would assume the most serious character, and the liberty he took to interpret as he pleased, rendered it as difficult to be offended as to reason with him.

The eloquent descriptions of Nature in Wordsworth's poems were conclusive proofs of atheism, for whoever believes in Nature, said Blake, disbelieves in God. For Nature is the work of the Devil. On my obtaining from him the declaration that the Bible was the Word of God, I referred to the commencement of Genesis—In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.

But I gained nothing by this, for I was triumphantly told that this God was not Jehovah, but the Elohim; and the doctrine of the Gnostics repeated with sufficient consistency to silence one so unlearned as myself. The Preface to the Excursion, especially the verses quoted from book i. These lines he singled out:. Jehovah with his thunder, and the Choir Of shouting Angels, and the Empyreal throne, I pass them unalarmed.

Wordsworth think he can surpass Jehovah? There was a copy of the whole passage in his own hand, [27] in the volume of Wordsworth's poems sent to my chambers after his death. There was this note at the end: It is called the Divine Mercy. Sarah dwells in it, but Mercy does not dwell in Him. Some of Wordsworth's poems he maintained were from the Holy Ghost, others from the Devil. I lent him the 8vo edition, two vols. They were sent me then. I did not recognise the pencil notes he made in them to be his for some time, and was on the point of rubbing them out under that impression, when I made the discovery.

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