Aetheric Reflections: Ezra Pound's "Drafts and Fragments"

Nocturne: Reflections sur Ezra Pound

or,

Late Liszt, Late Pound, and the Action of Old Ice?--Sublime

The word "sublime" is most commonly used to describe something of transcendent beauty or excellence.

But the word is also used in chemistry to mean the process by which a solid evaporates without passing through the intermediate step of existing in a liquid form (i.e., "liquefaction"). We usually think of evaporation as proceeding from a liquid, as water evaporating in the sunlight. But consider ice in a household freezer--in time it diminishes and disappears. A chemist would say that ice "sublimes". I find that a lovely usage....The ice fades from a cold, hard, sharply defined solid to an ethereal and intangible state. Who says that chemists are not poets?

This word occurred to me in the context of the "Drafts and Fragments" section of Ezra Pound's Cantos, but by an indirect metaphor: The musical compositions of Franz Liszt.

Reminiscent of the music of Liszt, Ezra Pound's poetry is considered difficult, and is approached with trepidation or avoided--or dismissed with contempt by those who don't want to make the struggle to rise to, and thereby transcend, their difficulties. The Cantos in particular are rarely studied, rarely read, and have not lent themselves to the academic cottage industries, so to speak, that rose up around the work of T.S. Eliot or James Joyce. And within the context of the Cantos, the "Drafts and Fragments" are problematic. Unlike the compositions of Eliot and Joyce, the Cantos are open-ended and unfinished. The Wasteland annotates itself quite neatly, and each of the Four Quartets is visibly structured, has its beginning and its end, and comfortably closes on the tonic. Ulysses also resolves, and while one might claim that Finnegans Wake has no beginning or end, Joyce completed it, and we feel, if we don't see how, that it gyres hermetic. That is comforting. But the structure of the Cantos overall is obscure to many, and sometimes even Pound specialists fail to see the relevance of the "Drafts and Fragments" to the rest of the poem.

Hence, a metaphor.

Liszt's music is often considered to be bombastic and it is thought by some to be primarily a vehicle to showpiece his incomparable virtuosity rather than a product of profound artistry. Many consider it showy and artistically superficial, particularly his early compositions; when he was young he was the musical showman of his day, and was regarded as technically without peer. His preoccupation with virtuosity appears in his writing at a shockingly early age (the first version of the Transcendental Etudes was written when he was fifteen). He retired from the concert stage at age 35, and he still haunts the minds of piano students and concert performers to this day. He is yet the benchmark, ideal, and looming presence of pianism. He was and remains, in a nutshell, il miglior fabbro.

[...I am getting to Ezra Pound! Patience, s'il vous plait, mesdames et messieurs....]

Please listen to this recording of a composition by Liszt, that old warhorse of the Romantic virtuoso, the Second Hungarian Rhapsody. O, hear! Velocity! Velocitous octaves! Rich chords and harmonies! Arpeggios and scales like Olympic sprinters run amok! Glissandi!! Accelerated repeated notes! Lots and lots of notes! Rhythm, syncopation, rubato, crescendo, diminuendo, themes, variations, playfulness, whimsy, heavy minors and capricious majors! And always that solid bedrock of tonality. The heavy anchor, buttress, and foundation of tonality. The emphatic return to and emphatic expression of the familiar key that tells us at the end where we are. A young man might know that. A brilliant young man in the bloom of virtuosity and vitality who has created, and in so doing limned and mapped, new worlds will be quite confident of where he is at the end of a mighty stride.

Now please listen to this recording of one of Liszt's late works, composed the year before he died, En Reve. It sublimes.

The Cantos began as a confident young virtuoso stepped out to create the epic of his time. A brilliant young man in the bloom of virtuosity and vitality who intends to create, limn, and map new worlds will also be quite confident of where he is at the inception of a mighty stride. Pound set off confident in the power of his facility and genius to circumnavigate new worlds while dragging the old along with him. A young man's objective. But his conception was that the unifying element that would bring these worlds together harmoniously was himself: The unifying element, the point of intersection, the harmonic axis of universes is the personal; after all, we need to stand at a point of reference. And the Cantos was to be the work, not of a beginning date and an end date, but of a lifetime. So what distinguishes the ambition of the Cantos from the ambition of Four Quartets is that it does not follow the ascents and descents of the sonata form as codified in the classic string quartet, a structure defined by long-departed craftsmen of 18th-Century music, but the arc of a life.

The Cantos begin with a bang, confidently rooted in a harmonic conception, a major triad in Greek-major: Homer--Dante--Confucius; and progression pivoted on the third: Inferno--Purgatorio--Paradiso. But, as life does, the Cantos went their own way. Certitude faded, vigor faltered, the solid evanesced. The "Drafts and Fragments" sublime.