Historicizing Modernism: Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos 9781472543035, 9781441188410

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Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos

Historicizing Modernism Series Editors: Matthew Feldman, Senior Lecturer in Twentieth Century History, University of Northampton, UK; and Erik Tonning, Director, Modernism and Christianity Project, University of Bergen, UK Assistant Editor: Paul Jackson, Senior Lecturer in History, University of Northampton, UK Editorial Board Professor Chris Ackerley, Department of English, University of Otago, New Zealand; Professor Ron Bush, St John’s College, University of Oxford, UK; Dr Finn Fordham, Department of English, Royal Holloway, UK; Professor Steven Matthews, Department of English, Oxford Brookes University, UK; Dr Mark Nixon, Department of English, University of Reading, UK; Professor Shane Weller, Department of Comparative Literature, The University of Kent, UK; and Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK. Historicizing Modernism challenges traditional literary interpretations by taking an empirical approach to modernist writing: a direct response to new documentary sources made available over the last decade. Informed by archival research, and working beyond the usual European/American avant-garde 1900–45 parameters the series reassesses established images of modernist writers by developing fresh views of intellectual backgrounds and working methods. Series Titles: The Autobiographies of Mina Loy, Sandeep Parmar Great War Modernisms and The New Age Magazine, Paul Jackson Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism, Edited by Janet Wilson, Gerri Kimber and Susan Reid Reframing Yeats, Charles Ivan Armstrong Samuel Beckett and Arnold Geulincx, David Ducker Samuel Beckett and Science, Chris Ackerley Samuel Beckett’s ‘More Pricks Than Kicks’, John Pilling Samuel Beckett’s German Diaries 1936–1937, Mark Nixon

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Praise for Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos ‘This illuminating study of Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos (62 to 71 of Pound’s Cantos) offers a tour de force of careful literary-historical scholarship, adroit reading, and lucid explication… This robustly researched book is a must for Pound scholars, and it can also be read profitably by those wishing to gain acquaintance with Pound’s poetics in the Cantos and the main lines of Pound’s middle years.” Miranda B. Hickman, Associate Professor of English, McGill University, Canada ‘Subtly engaged in Pound’s larger literary and cultural project of the 1930s, Ten Eyck deftly brings readers afresh to these underappreciated poems, illuminating Pound’s own reading of John Adams, his process of composition, and his development of “a documentary method” of poetic writing—one of the most radical elements of The Cantos. Ten Eyck’s greatest contribution, however, is his convincing insistence that we engage these poems and their politics literarily, and his teaching us how to do so.’ Catherine E. Paul, Professor of English, Clemson University, USA ‘…David Ten Eyck offers a careful and lucid analysis of Pound’s interest in John Adams, which crystallize in the Adams Cantos. By giving us fine close readings, and by looking at these Cantos in the context of Pound’s life and development of his political and social views, Ten Eyck successfully counters the general negative critical reception of this part of Pound’s magnum opus, also in terms of its poetic quality. He convincingly demonstrates how Pound’s use of the Adams material is a new development in his “historical method” and in the textual evolution of the poem, making his study an indispensable tool for any reader of Pound’s work.’ Peter Liebregts, Leiden University, The Netherlands ‘David Ten Eyck’s book provides an invaluable service to scholarship in its scrupulous adumbration of famously difficult modernist verse. Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos elaborates the “documentary method” at work in Pound’s epic, tracing its development from the Malatesta Cantos of the 1920s to its fullest expression in the inscrutable poems dealing with the political thought and milieu of John Adams, composed swiftly in the lengthening European shadows of World War Two. Ten Eyck accomplishes a rare thing by showing how Pound’s methods of citation transform from conventional (if dense) literary reference to what Peter Nicholls calls “an autonomous and continuous discourse.” In doing so, Ten Eyck unlocks a hitherto oblique dimension of Pound’s “poem containing history.” The book is a lesson in How to Read: it performs a material hermeneutics carefully calibrated to a deep and judicious awareness of seemingly intransigent poetic materials and underlying documentary evidence. More than bringing the archive into the text – though surely the book does a deft job of this – Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos reinvigorates our understanding of Pound’s own aspiration to write a poem that would function as a cultural repository, a textual place “where memory liveth.” ’ Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia

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Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos David Ten Eyck

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Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10010 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com First published 2012 © David Ten Eyck, 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. David Ten Eyck has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978-1-4411-8841-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ten Eyck, David. Ezra Pound's Adams Cantos / David Ten Eyck. p. cm. – (Historicizing modernism) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-0049-8 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-8841-0 (ebook (pdf)) 1. Pound, Ezra, 1885-1972. Cantos. I. Title. PS3531.O82C2975 2012 811'.52–dc23 2012029492 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Series Editor’s Preface vi Acknowledgementsvii Abbreviations  ix Notes on the Text xii Introduction: Ezra Pound’s ‘Adams Paideuma’1 1 The Genesis and Composition of the Adams Cantos 13 2 ‘Including History’: The Evolution of Ezra Pound’s Documentary 35 Method in the 1920s and 1930s 3 Reading the Adams Cantos 65 4 The Representation of History and Law in the Adams Cantos 85 5 The Adams Cantos and Ezra Pound’s Social Criticism of 111 the 1930s and 1940s 6 The Continuing Importance of the ‘Adams Paideuma’ in Ezra Pound’s Late Cantos 139 Appendices: A A Selection of Pound’s College Notes on Colonial and Revolutionary America 153 B Pound’s 1931 Reading Notes for the Works of John Adams157 C Tables of Reference in Pound’s Copies of the Works of John Adams169 D ‘Confucio Totalitario’ 175 E Unpublished Material on John Adams and the American Revolution from the Thrones Poetry Notebook 185 Notes195 Bibliography212 221 Index of Works by Pound Index224

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Series Editor’s Preface This book series is devoted to the analysis of late-nineteenth to twentieth century literary Modernism within its historical context. Historicizing Modernism thus stresses empirical accuracy and the value of primary sources (such as letters, diaries, notes, drafts, marginalia or other archival deposits) in developing monographs, scholarly editions and edited collections on Modernist authors and their texts. This may take a number of forms, such as manuscript study and annotated volumes; archival editions and genetic criticism; as well as mappings of interrelated historical milieus or ideas. To date, no book series has laid claim to this interdisciplinary, source-based territory for modern literature. Correspondingly, one burgeoning sub-discipline of Modernism, Beckett Studies, features heavily here as a metonymy for the opportunities presented by manuscript research more widely. While an additional range of ‘canonical’ authors will be covered here, this series also highlights the centrality of supposedly ‘minor’ or occluded figures, not least in helping to establish broader intellectual genealogies of Modernist writing. Furthermore, while the series will be weighted towards the English-speaking world, studies of non-Anglophone Modernists whose writings are ripe for archivally-based exploration shall also be included here. A key aim of such historicizing is to reach beyond the familiar rhetoric of intellectual and artistic ‘autonomy’ employed by many Modernists and their critical commentators. Such rhetorical moves can and should themselves be historically situated and reintegrated into the complex continuum of individual literary practices. This emphasis upon the contested self-definitions of Modernist writers, thinkers and critics may, in turn, prompt various reconsiderations of the boundaries delimiting the concept ‘Modernism’ itself. Similarly, the very notion of ‘historicizing’ Modernism remains debatable, and this series by no means discourages more theoreticallyinformed approaches. On the contrary, the editors believe that the historical specificity encouraged by Historicizing Modernism may inspire a range of fundamental critiques along the way. Matthew Feldman Erik Tonning

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Acknowledgements This study draws on archival research carried out intermittently over a period of more than ten years, relating primarily to Pound’s Adams Cantos, but also involving several other sections of The Cantos. Over the course of these years my work has been supported and enriched by the contributions of numerous friends and colleagues. I am grateful to have the opportunity to recognise the most important of these debts here. This book builds upon my doctoral thesis, entitled ‘The Development and Composition of Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos’, which was written under the supervision of Professor Ronald Bush at Oxford University. Ronald Bush’s guidance during my years as a doctoral student and the exchanges I have had with him since that time have been crucial in opening many of the avenues of investigation that are explored in these pages. His critical incisiveness, scholarly rigour and collegial generosity have been a model to me in my own work, and I am deeply grateful for his guidance and friendship, both in the context of the present study and in that of an ongoing editorial project on Pound’s Pisan Cantos. I am likewise grateful to Professors Jeri Johnson and Peter Nicholls, who acted as examiners for my doctoral thesis, and whose comments were invaluable to me as I set about revising and expanding upon my thesis. I am indebted as well to St Anne’s College and Worcester College, at Oxford University, for the generous financial assistance they made available to me during my doctoral studies. The majority of the archival research on which this study is based was done at Yale University’s Beinecke Library, and I would like to thank Nancy Kuhl and the rest of the Beinecke’s staff for the knowledgeable assistance and friendly service they have provided over the years. My thanks also go to the staff at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, at the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University of Toledo, Ohio and at Harvard University’s Houghton Library. I am likewise grateful to Faber and Faber for allowing me to consult their editorial and production files. During my work on this book I have benefited enormously from the spirit of collegial exchange that exists within the community of Ezra Pound scholars. My debts to fellow Pound scholars are far too numerous to acknowledge in full. Particular thanks go to Anderson Araujo and Bernard Dew, for the precious friendship and stimulating conversations about all things Poundian that we have shared over the years; to Michael Biondi, David Moody and Stephen Wilson for their astute readings of the Adams Cantos and for the generosity with which they have shared their insights into these poems; to Richard Parker, Helen Carr and the London Cantos Reading Group, who offered me the chance to present a portion of this project at one of their meetings; to Mark Byron, David Cappella, John Elek, Peter Liebregts, Alec Marsh and Catherine Paul, for the insights they have offered into Pound’s poetry in conversation and in correspondence; and to the organizers of the biannual International Ezra

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x Acknowledgements Pound Conference, particularly Walter Baumann, John Gery and William Pratt. These conferences have offered me a venue where I was able to present aspects of this project and to benefit from valuable exchanges with Pound scholars from around the world. I am likewise grateful to the editorial team at Paideuma, who have remained so firmly committed to the dissemination of Pound scholarship over the years. Part of the final chapter of this book is based on an article originally published in Paideuma’s special issue on ‘Ezra Pound and American Identity’ in 2005, under the direction of Hugh Witemeyer. Like all students of Ezra Pound, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the Pound family and to Pound’s publishers. Mary de Rachewiltz’s inspirational support for the study and transmission of Ezra Pound’s work has been invaluable to generations of Pound scholars. Without her generosity, and the generosity of the Pound Estate, in making available documentary materials, studies such as mine would not be possible. Likewise, the care and devotion with which New Directions in New York and Faber and Faber in London have managed their stewardship of Pound’s work has been indispensable in bringing this project to fruition. I would also like to thank Laura Murray, Colleen Coalter and the editorial team at Bloomsbury for their patient and devoted work in seeing this project into print. I am grateful to Matthew Feldman and Erik Tonning for their commitment to the ‘Historicizing Modernism’ series, which provides an invaluable forum for highly focused archival studies such as this. Finally, on a personal level, I am very deeply grateful to my family for the support and loving encouragement that they have offered me over the course of my years of work on Pound’s poetry, and for the sacrifices they have made so that I might visit archives, attend conferences and devote long hours to research. To my wife Stéphanie, my children Marie, Elliot and Arthur, and my parents Jim and Vernoica, my most heartfelt thanks – neither this book, nor much else, would have been possible without you.

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Abbreviations Works by Pound ABCR

ABC of Reading. 1934. New York: New Directions, 1960.

C

The Cantos. Thirteenth printing. New York: New Directions, 1995. All references to The Cantos are followed by the Canto number and page number in this edition, separated by a slash. For example: (C, 62/341).

CEP

The Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Michael John King. New York: New Directions, 1976.

Con

Confucius: The Unwobbling Pivot, The Great Digest, The Analects. New York: New Directions, 1951.

EPCF

Ezra Pound’s Chinese Friends, ed. Zhaoming Qian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

EPCP

Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, Contributions to Periodicals, ed. Lea Baechler, A. Walton Litz and James Longenbach, 11 vols. New York: Garland, 1991. References to this text are followed by volume and page number.

EPEC

Ezra Pound’s Economic Correspondence, ed. Roxana Preda. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.

EP/GHT “Dear Uncle George”: The Correspondence between Ezra Pound and Congressman Tinkham of Massachusetts, ed. Philip J. Burns. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1996. EP/JI

Letters to Ibbotson, 1935–1952, ed. Vittoria I. Mondolfo and Margaret Hurley. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1979.

EP/ORA I Cease Not to Yowl: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, ed. Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos and Leon Surrette. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. EP/Parents Ezra Pound to His Parents, Letters 1895–1929, ed. Mary de Rachewiltz, A. David Moody and Joanna Moody. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. EP/SN One Must Not Go Altogether with the Tide: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Stanley Nott, ed. Miranda B. Hickman. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011.

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xii Abbreviations GB

Gaudier-Brzeska. 1916. New York: New Directions, 1974.

GK

Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970.

J/M

Jefferson and/or Mussolini. 1935. New York: Liveright, 1970.

LE

Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1976.

MA

Machine Art & Other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.

P

Personae, The Shorter Poems, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz. New York: New Directions, 1990.

SL

Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige. New York: New Directions, 1971.

SP

Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.

SR

The Spirit of Romance. Rev. edn. New York: New Directions, 1968.

Other works HGC

Joseph Anne Marie Moyriac de Mailla, Histoire Générale de la Chine, ou Annales de cet Empire, 11 vols. Paris: Ph.-D. Pierres & Clousier, 1777–85. References to this text are followed by volume and page number.

WJA

John Adams, Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, 10 vols. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1850–56. References to this text are followed by volume and page number.

Library archives EPP, Beinecke Ezra Pound Papers (YCAL MSS 43), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. All references to material in this collection are followed by box, folder and (where appropriate) page numbers. For example: (EPP, Beinecke, 72, 3212, p. 6). Faber Material held in the Production and Editorial Files at Faber and Faber’s offices in London. Lilly Pound MSS. III, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

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Abbreviations

xiii

ORP, Beinecke Olga Rudge Papers (YCAL MSS 54), Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. All references to material in this collection are followed by box, folder and (where appropriate) page numbers. For example: (ORP, Beinecke, 9, 223, p. 1). Toledo Ezra Pound’s annotated set of the Works of John Adams, which is housed at the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections at the University of Toledo, Ohio. All references to Pound’s copy of the Works are followed by volume and page number. For example: (Toledo IV, 407).

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Notes on the Text In all cases where Pound’s manuscripts or typescripts are quoted, no attempt has been made to standardise spelling or punctuation and the abbreviation sic has not been used. Editorial interpolations and explanations have been placed within square brackets. In instances where Pound’s handwriting is difficult to decipher, leaving some doubt as to the appropriate reading, the text in question has been placed in square brackets with a question mark. In instances where there is serious doubt about the appropriate reading, the word ‘illegible’ has been placed in square brackets in place of the indecipherable text. All translations from foreign languages are those of the author unless otherwise specified. All previously unpublished material by Ezra Pound: Copyright © 2012 by Mary de Rachewiltz and the Estate of Omar S. Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, agents. All published material by Ezra Pound used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

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Introduction Ezra Pound’s ‘Adams Paideuma’ Although they are centrally located within Ezra Pound’s career and intersect with crucial developments in his reflections on history, government and poetic form, the Adams Cantos have received a proportionately small amount of critical attention. Unconvinced by the section’s radically source-based poetics and put off by Pound’s close involvement with Fascist politics at the time of its composition, even many of the most sympathetic readers of The Cantos have been inclined to minimise the importance of these poems. The trajectory of Pound’s career in the late 1930s and 1940s is not uncommonly described in terms of failure and recovery. In this vision, the Adams Cantos represent a poetic dead-end from which Pound freed himself only after World War II, when he radically transformed his poetic procedures as he wrote The Pisan Cantos. George Kearns puts forward such a view, for example, when he characterises the Adams Cantos as being ‘written rapidly, [at a time] when Pound was most distracted by political propaganda’ (Kearns 1989, 44), before going on to suggest that the Pisan Cantos ‘transformed a floundering poem [that might otherwise] well appear today merely a curiosity of literary modernism’ (ibid., 45). While disagreement as to the poetic merits of the Adams Cantos will continue, it must be recognised that these poems offer crucial insights into formal strategies and thematic concerns that have broad relevance for Pound’s career. They help to clarify evolutions in the way he handled historical documents, in the relationship between his poetry and his politics, and in his handling of American subject matter. An attentive reading of this sequence is likewise essential if one is to appreciate the growing importance of Pound’s reflections on government and on the legal framework of the state to his work on The Cantos. In keeping with the goals of the ‘Historicizing Modernism’ series, the central purpose of this book is to make available archival material and to elucidate historical contexts that will allow readers to return to the Adams Cantos with a fuller understanding of how the sequence was composed and of how it relates to the broader sweep of Pound’s career. It is the author’s hope that by doing so it will also cause certain readers to reflect anew on Pound’s poetic accomplishment in the Adams Cantos. But even where this is not the case, it is hoped that by rigorously situating the Adams Cantos within their historical and archival context, this work of literary-historical scholarship will give a new impetus to discussions of the poetry that Pound wrote in the late 1930s. *** Ezra Pound composed the ten John Adams Cantos (62–71) very quickly, at the end of 1938 and over the first few months of 1939. They were written as the second part of

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Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos

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a twenty-canto diptych, together with the ten Chinese History Cantos (52–61). These ten earlier cantos had begun with an evocation of seasonal rhythms, based upon the Li Ki (the Book of Rites), before offering a condensed narration of Chinese history from 2837 bc to ad 1736. Collectively, the Chinese History Cantos and the Adams Cantos were entitled Cantos LII–LXXI and published in 1940 by Faber and Faber in Europe and by New Directions in the United States. Pound’s basic goal in writing these twenty cantos was to offer an extended engagement with historical records, focusing on the question of what constituted good government. The Chinese Cantos introduced a continuous historical narrative into The Cantos, which had hitherto been characterised by rapid shifts from one historical moment to another, while the Adams Cantos represented by far Pound’s most extensive treatment of American subject matter to date.1 Both groups of cantos employed new poetic strategies, a fact which Pound drew to Faber executive F.V. Morley’s attention in a 1939 letter, telling him, ‘you are gettin something NEW in the Cantos; not merely more of the same. Trust at least two advances in mode will be perceptible by you and the PSM [Eliot]’ (Surette 1979, 146–7). The primary advance of which Pound spoke was the method of extended citation of material from a single text, which is used as the source for a whole block of cantos: Joseph de Mailla’s eleven-volume Histoire Générale de la Chine for the Chinese History Cantos and the ten-volume Life and Works of John Adams for the Adams Cantos. The poetry of Cantos LII–LXXI thus depends upon Pound’s ability to achieve an extreme condensation of the essential ideas and actions presented in these source-texts, while relating them in a language that speaks to a twentieth-century audience. It is likely that the highly condensed form he achieved in these cantos was another of the advances of which he spoke to Morley, and he drew attention to this aspect of his writing in the blurb he prepared for the dust jacket of the first edition of Cantos LII–LXXI: ‘Poetry: the WORKS, action or process. The German “dichten” meaning to condense.’

The critical heritage of the Adams Cantos Few of Pound’s readers, however, have been prepared to go along with his belief that Cantos LII–LXXI constituted an ‘advance’ over what had gone before. Randall Jarrell’s review of the book in The New Republic is illustrative of the dismay with which it was received even by those closest to Pound and most sympathetic to his poetics: I had thought of Ezra Pound as the one thing constant in this fleeting world. Continents sank under the sea, empires fell: Vienna fell, Canton fell, Warsaw fell: the unmoved sage sat on at Rapallo, like Idiosyncrasy on a monument – the warm Italian breeze bore out over a universe of cretins his condemnations and invective, his economic panaceas, his wd’s and cd’s and shd’s, his American slang unparalleled outside the pages of an English novel. But as Hitler says, there are no more islands: Mr. Pound has deteriorated with the world. Cantos LII–LXXI contains the dullest and prosiest poetry that he has ever written. These cantos are so bad that they would not seem his at all, if they were not so exactly like the very worst

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Introduction

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portions of the old ones. Mr. Pound has become himself to the ∞th degree, his day-dream is at last absolute. One sees implicit in every page: ‘Le droit, c’est moi’. Prejudice, whim, idiosyncrasy, have been hypostatized into a universal imperative. Mr. Pound is obviously one of the most talented poets of our time; yet these cantos are almost unreadable. (Erkkila 2011, 268–9)

Jarrell’s damning assessment touches on many of the features of the sequence that have baffled and infuriated generations of Pound’s readers. It is worth quickly summarising these criticisms before proceeding. Most basically, numerous readers have criticised the Adams Cantos for their lack of clarity in the presentation of their protagonist’s life and times. Pound’s source for these cantos, the Works of John Adams, is not arranged chronologically, like de Mailla’s Histoire Générale de la Chine. Rather, it organises Adams’s writings by genre. Volume one is a biography of John Adams, mostly written by his grandson Charles Francis Adams, the editor of the Works. Volumes two and three contain John Adams’s diary and autobiographical writings. Volumes three to six contain his political writings, while volumes seven to ten contain his state papers and correspondence. The correspondence is itself divided into two parts: the official correspondence, which is contained in volumes seven and eight and the first part of volume nine, and the private correspondence, which fills the remainder of volume nine and all of volume ten. Since the Works are so organised, Pound’s decision to proceed through them sequentially means that ‘his presentation does not result in a single linear chronological account of the career of John Adams’ (Sanders 1975, 19).2 In the Chinese History Cantos, Pound was at pains to emphasise the chronological sequence to which his exposition of nearly 5,000 years of Chinese history adheres. Italicised dates appear at regular intervals in the margins of these cantos, enabling the reader to position herself within a historical space that exists independently from Pound’s source. Likewise, the names of individual emperors and of imperial dynasties are generally capitalised in these cantos, so as to insist on the process of dynastic rise and fall that constitutes their most basic subject matter. In the Adams Cantos, however, Pound’s decision to adhere to the structure of his source at the expense of chronology means that his readers must make a considerable effort simply to recognise and respond to the historical subject matter of the sequence. Nor is this task rendered any easier by Pound’s decision to minimise the importance of some of the most widely familiar events of John Adams’s life and times, such as his presidency or the military history of the American Revolution. It is ironic that one of Pound’s stated goals in writing the Adams Cantos should have been to clearly define the terminology necessary to achieve well-ordered government. For while these poems repeatedly insist on the importance of being ‘clear / as to definitions’ (C, 67/387), many readers have judged them unfavourably precisely because they seem to lack such clarity themselves. Donald Davie, for example, concluded his account of the section in his influential study Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor by claiming that Pound’s cuts and compressions and juxtapositions make a non-sensical hurlyburly of Adams’s life, a life that was harried indeed but admirably purposeful.

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Adams’s politicking was not senseless and desperate like Sigismundo Malatesta’s. And indeed Pound knows this. Yet his method, ruinously wasteful and repeatedly arbitrary, blurs all distinctions. (Davie 1965, 163)

Humphrey Carpenter, writing twenty years after Davie, drew an unfavourable comparison between the Chinese History Cantos and the Adams Cantos on the grounds that while in the former ‘the reader has a vague idea of what is going on [, the latter] are three-quarters opaque’ (Carpenter 1988, 572). To explain this opaqueness Carpenter points specifically to Pound’s management of his source: Ezra rushed through the ten-volume Charles Francis Adams edition of the John Adams Works (1850–56) – as he had done with the de Mailla – picking out incidents from Adams’s life and activities that caught his eye, and transposing them into the Cantos. However, whereas de Mailla presented his Chinese information chronologically, the Adams Works were organised differently, with the material divided according to sources. Hard as it is to believe, Ezra simply ignored this, and put his chosen quotations into the Cantos in the order in which they happened to appear in the Works. In consequence he made complete nonsense of Adams’s life. (Ibid., 573)

A second line of criticism against the Adams Cantos has been formulated by readers with a taste for lyrical poetry, or at least with the inclination to judge a poet’s achievement on the basis of the originality of his or her writing. For such readers Cantos LII–LXXI offered very little. The review of the volume that Louise Bogan wrote for the New Yorker neatly summarises the frustration of readers who admired Pound’s lyrical abilities, but were uninspired by his attempts to achieve a poetic mode based on the extreme condensation of seemingly obscure documents, all derived from a single source. ‘We are given,’ Bogan complains: the atmosphere of American Colonial laundry bills and old promissory notes. Pound’s early ability to open up gaps in his narration, through which we saw tranquil sea and landscapes and lovely, cool forms of antique beauty, has totally disappeared. The only asides are scatological ones, of an extremely childish and petulant kind, and a few yelps of pure race hatred. (Erkkila 2011, 268)

Readers seeking the formal and metrical innovation so evident in earlier cantos, or at least some effort to weave the new material together with the thematic strands of the first fifty-one cantos, also had reason to be frustrated with Cantos LII–LXXI. Thus, Peter Makin summarised his dissatisfaction with the sequence by claiming that it fails to have emotive shape for two reasons. Long stretches are obscure, in a sense properly applicable to poetry: they do not impart enough ‘information’ through channels available to poetry (denotative, metrical, of image) to create emotional direction. Second, elsewhere the emotion generated is too uniform in nature. (Makin 1985, 212)

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Introduction

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More basically, Pound’s apparent lack of effort to create connections between the new cantos and what had gone before are pointed out by readers such as Humphrey Carpenter and Ira Nadel.3 Finally, numerous appraisals of Cantos LII–LXXI have focused on the biographical context within which these poems were produced, pointing out that the late 1930s and early 1940s were a period of hyperactivity for Pound, as well as being a time that was heavily marked by his political propaganda in favour of Italian Fascism and by the most distasteful expressions of his anti-Semitism. A simple survey of the scope of Pound’s activities in the six-year period from 1937 to 1943 lends credence to the idea that Pound was overworked in these years and that he became artistically careless as a result. In addition to writing Guide to Kulchur (1937) and Cantos LII–LXXI (1940), and overseeing the publication of The Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937), Pound published well over a hundred articles on politics, economics and culture in a variety of magazines over these years and completed pre-publication drafts of numerous other such articles that were never printed for one reason or another.4 He delivered over a hundred speeches on Rome Radio and most likely also wrote several more, which were delivered by other speakers.5 He wrote well over 1,000 letters to more than a hundred different correspondents, almost all of which transcend the private sphere and seek to further the artistic, economic and political projects with which he was occupied.6 In addition to this literary and political activity, Pound organised yearly concerts in Rapallo and, with his companion Olga Rudge, sponsored the reproduction of manuscripts of Vivaldi’s music, promoting the composer’s reputation within musical circles. Finally, he travelled extensively within Italy during this time and made two long trips abroad, to England in 1938 and to the United States in 1939. The latter was made expressly for political purposes, as Pound hoped to obtain interviews with government officials in Washington in order to persuade them against involving the United States in an eventual European war.7 Pound cuts the figure in these years of a man working himself to the point of exhaustion, spreading his considerable energy and talent over an impossibly wide field, and in the process compromising the technical care that characterises his finest poetry and losing the ability to make measured judgements on political, economic and cultural matters. Many of his activities at this time suggest a dangerously inflated sense of his own abilities and of their relevance to world affairs. In writing Guide to Kulchur, for example, he believed he had produced ‘a universal history of all human Kulchur or whatever, in approx[imately] 70,000 words’ (EP/JI, 71). His use of the radio to speak directly to a mass audience, in the belief that he was giving ‘the young men of England and America … [material] to build their souls, or at least their minds for tomorrow’ (Carpenter 1988, 590) bespeaks a similar loss of perspective in his estimation of the impact he might hope to have on world affairs. The same may be said of his efforts to meet with heads of state such as Roosevelt and Mussolini in order to convince them of the justice of his political and economic views. Cantos LII–LXXI was written in the midst of this hyperactivity, and Pound clearly saw it as a book that would further the political and economic agenda he was pursuing by other means at the time. He even went so far as to send a copy of the book to Mussolini, telling him in the accompanying letter:

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I hope I have done some useful work, especially in condensing some historical facts in my CANTOS 52/71. The book is accordingly hardly neutral and my editors have cancelled the name Rothschild from the first page. (Zapponi 1976, 53)

Given this situation, it is unsurprising that many of Pound’s readers have been moved to draw connections between the perceived flaws of these cantos and Pound’s other activities at the time they were composed. Having offered a biographical sketch of these years of Pound’s life, for example, Humphrey Carpenter declares that: [i]n the John Adams Cantos we encounter a mind in chaos. Ezra purports to give Adams to us as an example of pragmatic wisdom, an embodiment of Confucian ethics. But he actually presents a frighteningly candid picture of his own intellect. (Carpenter 1988, 573)

Reflecting more sympathetically on this period of Pound’s career, David Moody is moved to associate it with his later admission: ‘[t]hat [he] lost [his] center / fighting the world’ (C, 117 et seq./816; Moody 1992, 80). Even Hugh Kenner seeks to qualify the shortcomings of Cantos LII–LXXI along these lines, commenting that by the late 1930s ‘the Cantos … had used up much of their capital, and were confronting material the author had not known for very long’ (Kenner 1971, 433). While Massimo Bacigalupo, foregrounding the political dimension of what Pound had done in Cantos LII–LXXI, reads the section as a misguided attempt to transform The Cantos into an organ of Fascist propaganda; to marry his unfolding epic to the fate of Mussolini’s régime: [Pound] set his hand in 1938 to compartments third and fourth of the middle cantos, China-John-Adams – and produced a glaring example of regime art, or of what we could call ‘fascist realism’. (Bacigalupo 1980, 98)

The lasting importance of Pound’s Adams paideuma In spite of the predominately negative responses they have received over the years, the Adams Cantos remain a vitally important part of Pound’s oeuvre. It is worth noting that Pound’s own view of what he had accomplished in Cantos LII–LXXI was unfailingly positive. He wrote to Agnes Bedford in 1939 that these newly completed cantos were: a progruss on the earlier ones tenny rate somfink different. (Carpenter 1988, 569)

And there is no evidence that his estimate of the section ever changed in the years following World War II. When he attempted to describe the structure of The Cantos during the later stages of his work on the poem, he consistently stressed the central importance of Cantos LII–LXXI. An explanation that he offered to James Laughlin in 1953, for instance, spoke in terms of the poem having three major subdivisions:

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A. Dominated by the emotions. B. Constructive effort – Chinese Emperors and Adams, putting order into things. C. The domination of benevolence. Theme in Canto 90. Cf. the thrones of Dante’s ‘Paradiso’. (Ibid., 812)

Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, has recently echoed this assessment of the role that the Adams Cantos play in the structure of The Cantos, stressing that ‘[c]ontrary to accepted opinion, Cantos LXII–LXXI, the Adams Cantos, are to my mind the mandrel, the axial center that holds Pound’s epic together’ (de Rachewiltz 2011, 266). The selections that Pound made for Selected Cantos in 1965 (the volume was published in 1967 by Faber and Faber and in 1970 by New Directions) are likewise a reminder of the importance he continued to attribute to Cantos LII–LXXI in his later years.8 He was at pains, in this book, to represent equally each section of The Cantos, and he reserved twenty of its 110 pages for the Chinese History Cantos and Adams Cantos (only slightly less than the proportion given in the actual text). In making his selections from the Pisan Cantos he also chose passages that reinforce key motifs of the Adams Cantos, notably electing to reproduce Canto 84 in its entirety, with its concluding panegyric to John Adams: ‘John Adams, the Brothers Adam / there is our norm of spirit / … whereto we may pay our / homage’ (C, 84/554). It is clear that what Pound called his ‘Adams paideuma’ (C, 256) – or, to use the language he employed in Guide to Kulchur, his poetic rendering of ‘the gristly roots of ideas’ (GK, 58) that were put into constructive action by John Adams – retained great value for him over the two and a half decades during which he continued to work on The Cantos.9 Thematically, the Adams Cantos remained associated in his mind with the notion of constructive effort, directed at laying down the ethical and legal foundations of a just state. This remained one of the major thematic strands of the late cantos and, as will be shown in Chapter 6 of this study, Pound frequently thought back to what he had done in the Adams Cantos as he sought to elaborate on this theme over the course of the 1950s and early 1960s. In terms of poetic form, Pound remained convinced of the advances he had achieved in Cantos LII–LXXI. He continued to make substantial use of the technique of extended citation from a single source in both Rock-Drill and Thrones, albeit never on anything approaching the same scale as what he had done in Cantos LII–LXXI.10 This poetic strategy allowed him to directly and rapidly present what he considered to be the essential features of a given text or historical moment. The succession of swift juxtapositions generated by this mode of writing imparts energy to the poetry and encourages the reader to assume an active role, making connections between the fragments of the source text from which the poem is composed and arriving at an understanding of the basic subject of the source material in the process.11 This poetic method constrains Pound to work within the space predefined by his source, employing the language of that text wherever possible. Yet it would be a mistake to think that this limits the poetic value of his writing. The method that Pound employed in the Adams Cantos, and in numerous cantos from Rock-Drill and Thrones, simply meant that his creative energy was channelled into the mediation of a pre-existing text for the contemporary reader, rather than into original composition. The value of such poetry resides in Pound’s ability to select and effectively juxtapose

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material from his source, while acting upon the language of that source so as to bring it to life for readers of his own time. These qualities of the Adams Cantos are too often ignored, and if they go unappreciated it is difficult to respond to much of what Pound sought to do in Rock-Drill and Thrones. It is therefore important that readers of The Cantos approach the Adams Cantos not merely as a way to better understand Pound’s handling of American subject matter or his efforts to inscribe his political and economic commitments of the late 1930s into his epic, but that they also seek to engage poetically with this sequence. Efforts have already been made to lay down the critical groundwork for such engagement. The poetic merits of Pound’s technique of selecting and juxtaposing textual fragments from the Works of John Adams have, for example, been very usefully described by David Moody in his essay ‘Composition in the Adams Cantos’. Here Moody employs a musical metaphor to encourage readers to re-evaluate Pound’s accomplishment in the Adams Cantos. He compares the textual fragments that Pound culled from the Works and juxtaposed in his poem to notes that are related to one another as they would be in a musical sequence. Moody demonstrates how such a reading strategy might be applied to a fourteen-line passage from Canto 66, which he sees as [a] practical demonstration of how to relate verbal impressions, partly visual, partly aural, partly referring to common knowledge and experience, as if they were indeed the notes and phrases of a purely musical composition – a sonata, say, rather than a full symphony. It is as if Pound had been using Adams’s diary as a set or series of possible effects, from which the next ‘right’ note or phrase had to be selected in order. (Moody 1992, 85)

Contemporary comments that William Carlos Williams made about Pound’s ability to carry the common language of the day into his verse, even as he engaged with the historical record, likewise help clarify the nature of Pound’s poetic achievement in the Adams Cantos. In two letters that Williams wrote to James Laughlin in 1940, soon after having read Cantos LII–LXXI, he at once expressed his impatience with the economic, historical and political substance of Pound’s poetry, and his admiration for the excellence of its language. ‘It all revealed itself to me yesterday when I was reading his new Cantos, “Chinese Numbers” I calls it’, Williams told Laughlin. He doesn’t know a damn thing about China, the Chinese, or the language… . But in spite of it all, he’s a good poet. I had to acknowledge it as I read along in the Chinese abacus frame of his enumerating verse. It had charm, it had sweep, it had even childish innocence written all over it. He thinks he’s being terribly profound, frowningly serious, and all he’s doing is building blocks, and it’s lovely. (Laughlin 1987, 116)

In a second letter, written the same week, Williams elaborated at length on what he meant: All that is necessary to feel Pound’s excellence in [his] use of language, is to read the work of others, from whom I particularly and prominently exclude e.e.

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cummings. In the use of language, Pound and Cummings are beyond doubt, the two most distinguished American poets of today. It is the bringing over of the language of the day to the serious purposes of the poet, that is the difficult thing. Both of these men have evolved that ability to a high degree. Two faulty alternatives are escaped in the achievement of this distinction: there are plenty, who use the language well, fully as well as Pound, but for trivial purposes either in journalism, fiction, or even verse. I mean the usual stroking of the meter without penetration, where anything of momentous significance is instinctively avoided; there are, on the other hand, poets of considerable seriousness, who simply do not know what language is and unconsciously load their compositions with the minute anachronisms, as many as dead hairs on a mangy dog… . It is impossible to praise Pound’s lines. The terms for such praise are lacking. There ain’t none. You’ve got to read the line and feel first, then grasp through experience in its full significance, how the language makes the verse live. It lives. Even such uncompromising cataloguing as his Chinese kings, princes and other rulers, do live and become affecting under his treatment. It is the language, and the language only, that makes this true. (Ibid., 117–18)

Following the publication of the Pisan Cantos in 1948, Williams again reflected on the uniqueness of Pound’s handling of language in an essay entitled ‘The Later Pound’, which was written in 1950, but remained unpublished until 1973. Here he reaffirmed his basic judgement of Pound’s accomplishment in the Chinese and John Adams Cantos, and sought to find the ‘terms of praise’ he had declared lacking in his letter to Laughlin a decade earlier. In the process he suggested an essential poetic similarity between Cantos LII–LXXI and The Pisan Cantos that few other readers of Pound have been prepared to recognise. ‘The greatness of Ezra Pound,’ Williams asserts, lies not, as he grows older, in his esteemed ‘romantic passages’, but in the common text of his Cantos – the excellence of the fabric, the language of woof and warp, all through. It is the fineness, the subtlety, the warmth and the strength of the material that gives the distinction – awkward in some ways as the use of that figure must remain. For we are not speaking of cloth, but of a fabric of words whose essence, comparable to woven thread, is time… It is the time, the way the words are joined in the common line, common in the sense that the tissues of music are joined or, as one might speak of the book of common prayer, the general text. The ripening has been not in the passages usually picked out but rather in the superb passages (of nonsense, if you will) between. There his ear is shown at its best – joining phrases to time as it has not been done in the prosody of recent periods. Time is the pure element of Pound’s success – here he is unsurpassed – a quality that makes most other contemporary verse sound juvenile by comparison. It is an adult occupation and rouses, consequently, the resentment and derision of children. (Williams 1973, 124)

***

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Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos

In spite of the largely hostile critical response with which they have met, the Adams Cantos do, in fact, have an important place in the story of Ezra Pound’s effort to compose ‘a poem including history’, and they are themselves a far more substantial and complex poetic achievement than is often recognised. The aim of this book is to promote a fuller critical understanding of these poems – in terms of the lessons they can teach about Pound’s reflections on politics, economics and American history in the late 1930s, in terms of their relation to evolutions in his compositional method and in terms of their intrinsic poetic value. Archival material that makes possible a fuller understanding of the historical context of the Adams Cantos is foregrounded throughout. Although they are only one part of Cantos LII–LXXI, together with the Chinese History Cantos, the focus of this book remains squarely on the Adams Cantos. The Chinese History Cantos are addressed only when parallels between the two sections have been deemed useful for a fuller understanding of the Adams Cantos.12 It is true that these two sections of The Cantos mirror each other in important ways, and that they complement one another within the structure of Cantos LII–LXXI. Yet they also draw upon two very different strands of Pound’s intellectual heritage, to which it would be difficult to do justice in a single monograph. Moreover, the Adams Cantos generally provide more striking examples of Pound’s source-based poetics in Cantos LII–LXXI, since he transcribed material directly from his source as he composed them, whereas his use of a French source for the Chinese History Cantos meant that he engaged in translation and paraphrase as he composed those poems. The opening chapter of this book focuses on the genesis and composition of the Adams Cantos. Beginning with Pound’s first serious encounter with revolutionary America as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, it goes on to record his later readings of Adams’s Works and traces the manner in which Pound composed the Adams Cantos, in an effort to clarify points about which there is some confusion. Chapter 2 places the Adams Cantos within the context of the evolution of the documentary strategies that Pound used to include historical subject matter in The Cantos. It draws on archival material to study Pound’s compositional practice in the most well-known documentary cantos, beginning with the Malatesta Cantos (1923) and moving chronologically through a consideration of the Venetian Cantos (1928), the Jefferson-Adams Cantos (1934) and the Chinese and John Adams Cantos (1940).13 Chapter 3 engages with Pound’s poetic achievement in the Adams Cantos, exploring reading strategies for these poems and examining the far-reaching complex of ideas that Pound associated with the ‘Adams paideuma’. Chapter 4 deals specifically with Pound’s representation of history and the law in the Adams Cantos, engaging with the difficulties posed by his didacticism and his attempt to use poetry as a means of understanding history. Chapter 5 places the Adams Cantos within the context of Pound’s social criticism of the 1930s. While in no way proposing a complete overview of this vast topic, the chapter seeks to clarify the connections that exist between the Adams Cantos and Pound’s writing on social, economic and political subjects during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Finally, Chapter 6 points out the continued importance of John Adams and of early American history to Pound’s writing of the 1950s, most notably in the Coke Cantos (107–109).

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The Appendices make available previously unpublished archival material that will enable readers to more fully historicise Pound’s achievement in the Adams Cantos. Appendices A, B and C offer transcriptions of notes which Pound took on the American Revolution and on the Works of John Adams. Appendix A consists of notes which Pound took on the American Revolution during his time as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. While these notes do not deal specifically with John Adams, they foreshadow some of the major themes of the Adams Cantos in interesting ways. Appendices B and C make available the notes and tables of reference that Pound made as he read through the Works of John Adams, first in Paris in 1931, then as he was composing the Adams Cantos in Rapallo in 1938 and 1939. Appendix D offers a transcription of an unpublished Italian essay entitled ‘Confucio Totalitario’, that Pound most likely wrote in 1943. This essay helps to clarify certain key concepts of the Adams Cantos, particularly Pound’s understanding of the Confucian doctrine of the ‘right naming of things’, which is encapsulated in the chêng ming characters (正 名). Appendix E offers a transcription of an unused passage from the Thrones poetry notebook, which relates to John Adams and the American Revolution, and which Pound composed together with the Coke Cantos, at the end of 1957 and in the first months of 1958.

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The Genesis and Composition of the Adams Cantos One of the most frequent complaints made about the Adams Cantos is that Pound composed them in a rushed and careless manner, possessing only sketchy knowledge of his source. Many critical accounts begin by emphasising the speed at which the section was written, often accompanying such observations with remarks about Pound’s frenetic activity of the late 1930s and his desire to respond to the growing international crisis of the time.1 The critical consensus is that it took Pound between five and eight weeks to compose the Adams Cantos, during the winter of 1938 to 1939. Richard Sieburth’s statement that ‘the two hundred-page instalment of … the Chinese and Adams Cantos was written in only six months (the Adams portion in a mere five weeks)’ is typical in this regard (Sieburth 2003, xxiv).2 Nor, given the Adams Cantos’s predominantly negative image, should it be surprising that such compositional speed is sometimes used as evidence that these cantos were ill planned and sloppily executed. Humphrey Carpenter, for example, comments on the composition of the Adams Cantos that ‘Ezra rushed through the ten-volume Charles Francis Adams edition of the John Adams Works (1850–6) … rather than looking for any special catch’ (Carpenter 1988, 573). Peter Makin questions the seriousness of Pound’s engagement with the Works of John Adams by commenting that ‘the Adams part was in rough typescript by February 1939, though Pound in January 1937 had not yet clapped eyes on the source of that part’ (Makin 1985, 212). In other accounts, Pound is variously described as skimming rapidly through his source, as making light markings in his set of the Works and as leaving the pages in extended portions of the text uncut as he skipped them entirely. As a result of this critical heritage, the most commonly held image of the Adams Cantos’s composition is that of Pound rushing into an ill-considered engagement with material he was not equipped to handle effectively. Such a vision makes it very difficult to adequately position these poems within their poetic, historical and intellectual context. The first step in arriving at a fuller appreciation of the Adams Cantos is therefore to clarify the sequence’s compositional history, on the basis of archival evidence, so as to set right certain factual errors and so as to make other assertions appear in a fuller light. While Pound hardly possessed (or claimed to possess) expert knowledge of early American history or of John Adams’s life, for instance, it appears, when the relevant documents are gathered, that he devoted at least as much time to a consideration of these topics as he did to the subject matter from which he fashioned more highly considered cantos, like the Malatesta or the Siena Bank Cantos. Likewise, the speed at

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which the Adams Cantos were composed should be considered in relation to Pound’s compositional practice elsewhere. Indeed, it was typical for him to write quickly, taking time to work through problems before he set about composing, then producing a manuscript with remarkable speed and assurance. Speed of composition is as often a characteristic of his most widely praised works as it is of his less appreciated productions. The Pisan Cantos, for example, were themselves composed over a period of only four months after having been contemplated for a number of years – a fact that should not be obscured by the more remarkable circumstances surrounding the composition of that sequence.3 Guide to Kulchur, the major work that immediately preceded Cantos LII–LXXI, was likewise written with striking speed, its 370 pages being composed in four months, between February and May 1937 (SL, 288, 294).4 Pound refers explicitly to the methodological choices that made possible such swift composition near the beginning of this book, advertising them as a quality of his project: In the main, I am to write this new Vade Mecum without opening other volumes, I am to put down so far as possible only what has resisted the erosion of time, and forgetfulness. And to this there is material stringency. (GK, 33)

If Pound was able to compose Guide to Kulchur so quickly, in other words, it was because he was in active possession of a body of knowledge, and also of a methodology that allowed him to relate this knowledge efficiently to his reader. Speed, in this conception, becomes synonymous with the direct statement of ideas that are in action, or ‘intended to “go into action”’ (ibid., 34); or, to paraphrase the statement that Pound made on the dust-jacket of Cantos LII–LXXI, with a conception of poetry as ‘the WORKS, action or process’. Such statements, taken together with the way Pound worked elsewhere, make it difficult to associate the speed of the Adams Cantos’s composition with simple carelessness. To meaningfully evaluate the way he wrote these poems, it is rather necessary to examine the process by which he came to know John Adams, to identify those aspects of this figure’s life and times that had come to have ‘material stringency’ for Pound by the late 1930s, and to describe the compositional strategies that allowed him to give poetic form to Adams’s Works.

‘Two principles of human progress’: Pound’s college notes on the American Revolution Pound’s first meaningful encounter with early American history came at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1901 to 1902 academic year, when he took classes with the historian Herman Vandenburg Ames. Pound’s biographers agree on the influence Ames exerted on Pound at this early stage in his education. Noel Stock comments, for example, that Pound’s ‘curiosity regarding history [was] mildly stirred by Professor Ames’ during his time at the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Liberal Arts (Stock 1964, 8), while David Moody points to the archival evidence of Pound’s interest in American history at this time:

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That [Pound interested] himself in American history is attested by a dense sheaf of notes now in the Beinecke archive. Moreover, at least one of his teachers in this subject, the distinguished historian Herman Vandenberg Ames, allowed that even ‘cantankerous’ young Pound ‘might have a legitimate curiosity.’ (Moody 2007, 15)

Pound took three American history classes during his time as an undergraduate at Pennsylvania: ‘The Civil War and Reconstruction’, ‘Foreign Relations of the United States’ and ‘American Colonial History’.5 He retained a fondness for Ames, continuing to mention him in letters that he wrote to his parents even after leaving Pennsylvania.6 The notes that Pound took in his classes are indeed copious, bearing witness to a deep interest in the subject that must have provided a foundation for his later reflections on American history. The most important of these notes for the Adams Cantos relate to the course Pound took on American colonial history. They are incomplete, and if they have survived at all it is probably only because Pound later used the reverse sides of several leaves to take notes on Joseph Bédier’s text of Tristan et Iseut. Pound preserved his notes on Bédier’s Tristan in their entirety, and with them thirteen pages of his college notes on early American history. These pages are preserved with the Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke Library, in a folder labelled ‘Tristan of Bedier’ (EPP, Beinecke, 88, 3742). The six pages of these notes that relate most directly to the material covered in the Adams Cantos are transcribed in Appendix A. For the most part, this material consists of reading notes on two texts relating to revolutionary America: John Fiske’s two-volume study, The American Revolution (1891) and, especially, Albert Bushnell Hart’s Formation of the Union, 1750–1829 (1892). Hart was part of the first generation of professional American historians, and the general editor of the monumental twenty-six-volume American Nation series. He and his colleagues in this series adopted an essentially Whiggish outlook, describing a steady progress towards greater individual liberty and an essential convergence between the fundamental principals of British and American constitutional law.7 Though Pound’s reading was confined to specific extracts from these books (probably assigned reading for his classes), it is clear that he found much to his liking in Hart’s portrayal of colonial and revolutionary America. He notably copied an extended passage from Hart’s Formation of the Union which presents the American Revolution in terms of ‘2 principles of human progress’. In Hart’s opinion, the Revolution constituted an act of resistance against the arbitrary exercise of power by the British Parliament; a view that accords well with that of John Adams. The ‘[r]eal cause of Am Rev.,’ Pound copied from Hart, was not to be found in List of Grievances. The Revolution was right because it represented 2 principles of human progress. Am grew in importance + felt indignant at having their trade interfered with by men over the sea. 2 principles right of individual to profits of his own industry Rev. a resistance to arbitrary power.

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Colonists represented same principles as the minority in Eng. Arbitrary power was that of Parliament at this time in Eng. when the king virtually ruled Parliament + thus threatened Popular Government. (EPP, Beinecke, 88, 3742, p. 21)

Elsewhere in these college notes, Pound remarked on the attitude towards law in the American colonies (copying Hart’s statements about the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ being attached to the ‘supremacy of Law’, for instance). He made note of Hart’s observations on the economic causes of the American Revolution (‘taxes not a matter of Right but a gift of the people’). The distinction between Charter colonies, proprietary colonies and Royal colonies caught his attention, as did the conditions for individual suffrage in colonial America. And as he read, Pound took substantial notes on the legal basis for ‘English Controll of Colonies’. He notably copied Hart’s summary of this situation, which outlines the legal basis of the arguments that John Adams made in favour of the Revolution, as developed at length in the Adams Cantos: Cols. subject to Eng. law Crown originally had title to all land Parl. didn’t legislate for separate colonies till after 1765. Controll of King through Lords of Trade. (EPP, Beinecke, 88, 3742, p. 12)

It would, of course, be going too far to claim that the work Pound did on American history within the context of a university class at the age of 16 had any direct influence on poetry that he wrote almost forty years later. It is nonetheless worth remembering the historical background that Pound received as part of his formal education. Before he was ever exposed to the writings of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and other statesmen of eighteenth-century America, he was well versed in the historical events of this period. He was also in possession of a basic belief that the American Revolution played a role in advancing ‘principles of human progress’, and he had given some thought to the legal and economic context within which the Revolution occurred. When Pound decided to devote significant effort to the study of American history in the late 1920s, he did so in a very different historical context from the one he had known in his student days, and with the intention of using documentation of this historical moment to fill a specific role within The Cantos. It was at this time that he began to read Thomas Jefferson and John Adams at length and in detail, as well as John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, George Washington and other figures from early American history. As he did so, he achieved a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the period. Yet he nevertheless remained attached to many of the principles he had learned to associate with the American Revolution during his time at the University of Pennsylvania.

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‘The fruits of the Adams will be gathered in time’: Pound’s 1931 reading of the Works of John Adams Pound’s first meaningful engagement with John Adams’s writing came almost three decades after his time as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania when, in 1930, having completed work on A Draft of XXX Cantos, he turned his attention to the study of early American history that would be such a crucial part of Eleven New Cantos (published in 1934). Thomas Jefferson was clearly the central figure in Pound’s treatment of American history in Eleven New Cantos. Yet as he conducted research for the section he cast his net relatively wide, looking into material relating to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, Martin Van Buren, James Madison and John Quincy Adams as well as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Indeed, while over the years he had made some offhand comments that were dismissive of Adams,8 it is interesting to note the extent to which his attention was divided between Adams and Jefferson as he familiarised himself with the material that would form the basis for Cantos 31–34 and 37. The background reading that Pound did on early American history in these years is reasonably well documented in his correspondence, particularly in the letters he wrote to Olga Rudge, which are now preserved with the Olga Rudge Papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Library. It is clear from these letters that Pound devoted considerable time and thought to John Adams at the beginning of the 1930s, although much of this work did not find its way into The Cantos in those years. His engagement with Adams is introduced into the Rudge correspondence in a letter of 9 August 1930 in which he tells her cryptically that: ‘[I] have compulsed one vol. Adams letters’ (ORP, Beinecke, 9, 223). There is unfortunately no evidence that makes it possible to identify with any certitude the precise volume to which he refers in this letter. Nor does his phrasing even allow one to say whether he bought the book, or whether it was lent or given to him.9 A letter of the following day shows that he began working on this volume immediately and provides an illustration of the speed with which he turned his attention to John Adams following the completion of his work on A Draft of XXX Cantos: ‘At last, sheets of XXX to sign. It has at any rate got to the binder. He is plugging along with Adams Letters’ (ORP, Beinecke, 9, 224). The next reference to John Adams in Pound’s correspondence comes three months later, in a letter dated 1 November 1930, which this time shows him working specifically on the Jefferson– Adams correspondence. He reports to Rudge in this letter that ‘he has chawed thru another large hunk of Ad’s Jeff ’ (ORP, Beinecke, 9, 235). More important than the precise catalogue of Pound’s reading, however, is the extent to which his attention was divided between Adams and Jefferson as he familiarised himself with the material that would form the basis of Cantos 31–34 and 37. From its first appearance in August 1930 until the spring of 1931, John Adams’s name appears almost as regularly as that of Thomas Jefferson in Pound’s correspondence. In these months, his reading was divided between the volume of Adams’s letters mentioned above, the Adams–Jefferson correspondence and portions of the twentyvolume Lipscomb-Bergh edition of the Writings of Thomas Jefferson. Pound read

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the latter only very partially, focusing particularly on Jefferson’s correspondence. He seems to have been committed at a very early stage to the idea of composing at least a single canto centred on Jefferson, but at the same time he retained a keen interest in Adams. A letter of 24 December 1930, for example, written after a month of extensive reading of Jefferson’s correspondence, shows Pound again involved in reading Adams and searching for more of his writings: ‘About to end of his vol. of OLD Adams but eight more in London to be sent out’ (ORP, Beinecke, 10, 241). The reference here is fairly clearly to the Works of John Adams which, nine years later, would become his source for the Adams Cantos. The fact that he showed an interest in acquiring the books in 1930 bears witness to the eagerness with which Pound had read Adams over the previous months. Far from having decided, as the presentation of American history in Cantos 31–34 might lead one to believe, that Adams was a secondary figure to Jefferson, there is strong evidence that Pound had already come to the conclusion that the two men represented complementary but distinct forces in early American history. There was much to be gained, he already sensed, from a more extended engagement with John Adams than was possible within the schema of Eleven New Cantos. ‘The fruits of the Adams,’ he went on to tell Rudge at the end of the letter cited above, ‘will be gathered in time. He not going to anticipate them’ (ORP, Beinecke, 10, 241). Unfortunately, there is no evidence of what became of the eight Adams volumes of which Pound spoke in his December 1930 letter to Rudge. It is clear, however, that he had still received nothing by the spring of the following year. On 3 February 1931 he received a note from the London book dealer F.B. Neumayer which goes some way to explaining the situation. ‘Since receiving your card of December 27th’, Neumayer tells Pound, ‘I have not been able to find any letters of Adams, or the diary of John Quincy Adams’ (EPP, Beinecke, 37, 1537). One must thus assume that while Pound’s letter to Rudge implied that the eight Adams volumes were on hand and ready to be shipped, he had in fact only located them in a catalogue and sent a card to Neumayer placing a standing order that the dealer was never able to fill. His inability to procure the books did not, however, discourage Pound’s pursuit of further information on the subject. In the spring of 1931 he took a six-week trip to Paris (between 6 April and 22 May), in large part out of a desire to visit the Bibliothèque Nationale and consult material on early American history that he had been unable to acquire, including the Works of John Adams. In a letter of 24 March 1931, two weeks before leaving for Paris, Pound may be seen complaining to Rudge of ‘two hours chucked at hunting for GODDDDAM ticket to the stinking Bib[liothèque] Nat[ionale]’ (ORP, Beinecke, 10, 257). While a letter written two days earlier offers a good idea of the point to which his work on Cantos 32 and 33 had progressed prior to his departure for Paris: He has ordered his sleapink kar. As she has s’much to do, she do somfink more an’ send him back her carbon [f]or Canto 32. “The revolution” said Mr. Adams… Not that 33 is prob. in order. How the HELL can he be sposed to condencentrate ALL Mssrs Marx/Adams/T/J/etc. i[f] he is expected to fix his VOLITION etc/etc/ etc/ (ORP, Beinecke, 10, 256)

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As he prepared to leave for Paris, in other words, Pound was in possession of fairly advanced versions of the three American history cantos from Eleven New Cantos in which John Adams plays a part, even if he was still struggling to resolve some uncertainties about the precise themes to be presented and the poetic technique best suited to his purposes. Yet, even though he already had rough typescripts of these cantos, much of his research at the Bibliothèque Nationale was devoted to gathering further information about John Adams; information which, he must have known, could not be easily accommodated within the already fairly advanced structure of the three cantos he had written. The trip to Paris was perhaps, among other things, an early attempt to ‘gather the fruits’ of Adams’s writing. It was, at the very least, an effort to form a clearer idea of what exactly those fruits might be and how they might be included in his poem. While he was in Paris, Pound corresponded regularly with his wife Dorothy, and these letters provide a good account of the work he did at the Bibliothèque Nationale. On 16 April, not long after arriving in Paris, he specified the subjects he planned to explore there: ‘I haven’t yet seen what there is in the Bib. Nat. Americana (FranklinAdams etc). But will finish up as soon as I can without bustin’ a gut’ (Lilly). A letter of 28 April documents his first contact with the Works of John Adams, conclusively refuting the idea that he was entirely unfamiliar with the source for the Adams Cantos until relatively soon before beginning work on the section. He tells Dorothy in this letter that he [h]ad swat at J. Adams in Bib.Nat. but the “Works” wd take 50 days at 100 pages per.diem must invent some skimmier method. (Lilly)

Pound was thus already familiar with the Works in 1931, and saw them as a potentially important source of information that might be exploited in The Cantos, but he remained uncertain as to the method whereby they might be handled effectively. His subsequent letters to Dorothy record that he studied the Works over approximately ten days of his time in Paris. He read quickly and was content to skip significant portions of the text. On 3 May, for instance, he reported that he had ‘done a good deal of Adams – short of trying to read it word for word’ (Lilly). While he did not read the text word for word, however, he did make fairly extensive reading notes. These are preserved with the Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke Library and are reproduced in their entirety in Appendix B of this study.10 These notes provide a record of the themes upon which Pound focused when he read Adams at the beginning of the 1930s, and they make it clear that he had a firm knowledge of the contents and organisation of the ten volumes of Adams’s Works long before he set his hand to the composition of the Adams Cantos. What is most striking about Pound’s Bibliothèque Nationale notes on the Works of John Adams is the extent to which they reveal that his understanding of Adams remained stable over the course of the 1930s. To be sure, there were changes in Pound’s conception of this figure between 1931 and 1938, and these generally reflect the evolution of his political and economic ideas in those years. But on the whole it

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is possible to identify a distinctive thematic complex that Pound began to associate with Adams at the beginning of the 1930s and that eventually came to occupy a unique place within the poetic economy of The Cantos. Central to this were Adams’s concern to establish a machinery of government that could offer orderly democracy (as opposed to the Jeffersonian belief in minimal government), his attention to precise verbal definitions, and his opposition to banks of credit and his fear of oligarchy. Adams’s interest in the machinery of government is repeatedly stressed in Pound’s 1931 reading notes. ‘[Page] 81 – Orderly freedom’, he writes near the beginning of these notes. While the very last entry he made in Paris succinctly presents many of the major reasons for Adams’s attractiveness to Pound: I may be an enthusiast but I think a free govt is a complicated piece of machinery the nice + exact adjustment of w[hose] springs, wheels + weights is not yet comprehended by the artists of the age + still less by the people. (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251)

Here was a man, Pound must have begun to believe, who devoted his life to the problem of defining governmental machinery, seeking to bring it into meaningful contact with the people. Furthermore, the sensibility that John Adams brought to bear on this problem was that of a lawyer who was possessed of a respect for language akin to that of the poet, and who struggled throughout his life to achieve precise verbal definitions which, to use Pound’s own expression, would not remain merely in the abstract realm of ideas, but would go into action in ways that tangibly affected the daily lives of common citizens. The notes which Pound took in the Bibliothèque Nationale show that he was immediately taken by this aspect of Adams’s thinking. ‘Form of gov[ernmen]t inf[luence] on lang[uage]’, he copied from volume seven of the Works, then went on to note: lang[uage] in its turn influences not only form of gov[ernmen]t but the temper + the sentiments, + manners of the people. “To pres[ident] of cong[ress]” 5 Sept. – 1780 VII p. 249 Suggest to cong[ress] “The Am[erican] Acad[emy] for refining, improving + ascertaining the Eng[lish] Lang[uage]. (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251)

Pound’s attention to this question in the reading notes anticipates his insistence upon clear terminology as the basis of good government in the Adams Cantos. Language, according to this view, is an active force, capable of structuring governmental activity while at the same time remaining vitally linked to ‘the temper + the sentiments + the manners of the people’. The ‘refining, improving + ascertaining’ of the language thus

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becomes the most basic prerequisite for the establishment of a well-ordered state. While in 1931 Pound did not take notes on specific details of Adams’s legal work – which would be such a central part of the Adams Cantos – he had clearly noticed Adams’s care in defining legal terminology, and the influence his career as a lawyer had on his political vision. Finally, the economic theme that would be developed at length in the Adams Cantos – John Adams as defender of the fair distribution of wealth and opponent of banks of credit – is already present in germ in the Bibliothèque Nationale reading notes. The economic statement from the Works that most specifically caught Pound’s attention in 1931 relates to the notion of money being a sign, whose meaning is determined by the system within which it circulates. This notion is accompanied by a rejection of the gold standard: gold + s. but commodities vs – money as a sign vs Banks. (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251)

Such a definition of money, and such opposition to banks, identified Adams as a statesman who advocated the idea that nations must control their finances, rather than be financed.11 These ideas resonated with Pound’s own definition of money as ‘a certificate of work done’ (SP, 241) and his emphasis on ‘the problem of distribution’ as the most urgent economic problem of his time (SP, 234). Adams’s description of gold as ‘but [a commodity]’ would have also seemed to align him with the opposition to the gold standard expressed by C.H. Douglas and other economists championed by Pound.12 Finally, the 1931 reading notes show that Pound had taken note of the lines from the Jefferson–Adams correspondence on the relative dangers of monarchy and aristocracy, which he would quote repeatedly in the years ahead, siding with Adams’s assessment that aristocracy (or plutocracy) posed the most serious threat to the liberties of the people: ‘To T. J. apprehensive – you of the one I [of the] few’ (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251). In short, the Bibliothèque Nationale reading notes sketch out the basic thematic complex of reflection on the machinery of government, attention to the precise use of language, and concern for economic justice that would be developed at length in the Adams Cantos some eight years later. The differences between the portrait of John Adams which Pound sketched in these notes and the one he later offered in the Adams Cantos are comparably minor. There is, for one thing, a more populist edge to the 1931 reading notes than to the Adams Cantos. He had written to Olga Rudge on 22 December 1930, while reading Adams’s correspondence in Rapallo, that: Old Adams [is] vurry fine. Takin the paint off the lot of ’em; T. Jeff and Lafayette included. And redder than anything Before 1917… (ORP, Beinecke, 10, 240)

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Some of the notes Pound took at the Bibliothèque Nationale may be read in terms of his admiration for Lenin at this time, which is also registered in Jefferson and/or Mussolini.13 The representation of revolution, and of Adams’s struggle against arbitrary power in the reading notes, is thus slightly different from the Adams Cantos. The need to preserve the spirit of the American Revolution is stressed in the reading notes, with Adams complaining of the ‘total ignorance + oblivion of the revolution’ (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251), whereas in the Adams Cantos the emphasis is rather placed on the British legal tradition that was preserved by the Revolution. Likewise, resistance to British abuse of power is emphasised in the notes, without the corresponding attention to establishing the legal basis for just authority that is such a major theme in the Adams Cantos, as when Pound notes Adams’s bitter complaint against the ‘right of kings hence the rt. of Br[itish] midshpmn to search all american ships’ (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251). A more immediately striking difference in tone between the 1931 notes and the Adams Cantos relates to Pound’s desire to see Adams as being possessed of a passionate intelligence, of the kind he celebrates in Thomas Jefferson in Cantos 31 and 32. Thus, the first passage from the Works that Pound transcribed in 1931 relates to Adams’s ‘amorous disposition’, which, one must assume, informs his active and varied intelligence and influences his public activity: I was of an amorous disposition + very early from ten or eleven years of age was very fond of the society of females. I had my favourites among the young women + spent many of my evenings in their company. (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251)

This theme then becomes the most frequently recurring motif in Pound’s Bibliothèque Nationale notes, reappearing on virtually every page. It is present in such brief jottings as the single phrase ‘contributed to our enjoyment’, in the citation of a line from a letter to Jefferson in which Adams declares that the ‘fundamental princ[ipal] of all philos[ophy] + all Xtnty is “rejoice always in all things”’, or in the following attempt to link Adams’s ‘amorous disposition’ to his political, legal and philosophical inquiries: I will read Justinian by daylight – Gilbert’s Tenures At night On Sunday I will read the Enquiry into the natr of the Hum. Soul + I will sometimes read Ovid’s art of Love to Mrs. Savil. (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251)

The active and passionate intelligence of John Adams remains important to the Adams Cantos, of course. As Peter Liebregts rightly points out, these cantos place a strong ‘emphasis … on Adams’s own mind [as] Pound underlines the importance of awareness of the Self as a first step toward undertaking any morally good action’ (Liebregts 2004, 243). Yet the portrait of Adams’s mind that is put forward in the Adams Cantos emphasises active intelligence and the strength of Adams’s will far more than his ‘amorous disposition’ or his capacity to ‘rejoice in all things’. It is also a much less personal portrait. The sense of Adams’s character that the reader takes from the Adams Cantos comes not so much by way of direct statements by Adams

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himself, such as those which Pound transcribed in the Bibliothèque Nationale, but rather from the surprising juxtapositions and the energy imparted by Pound’s handling of his source. A final observation to be made about Pound’s 1931 notes is that as he read, he clearly made efforts to establish subject rhymes between Adams and the portrait of Jefferson which he had already prepared, either in Canto 21, or in the typescript drafts of Cantos 31–33. A passage transcribed from volume two of the Works, for example, which states simply: ‘many of them were scotchmen in their plaids + their music delightful’ (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251), resonates strongly enough with the sensibility that made Jefferson seek a gardener who played the French horn in Canto 21 that it seems likely Pound noticed it for this reason. There are likewise suggestions that Pound sought parallels in Adams for Jefferson’s defence of free trade, and for the preoccupation with channels of correspondence that is such a major theme of Canto 31. He thus jotted down such isolated observations as ‘free ships free goods’ or ‘80 duties on glass paper, painters’ colours and teas’ (EPP, Beinecke, 73, 3251) and he made note of Adams’s defence of New England’s fisheries, which would become one of the major subjects of the Adams Cantos. Yet, while it is clear that Pound was convinced of the value of the Works at the time of his trip to Paris, there is no evidence that he had any intention of using his notes immediately, either as part of a revision of Cantos 31–33 or as the basis for a canto that would complement the material he already had in rough typescript form in May 1931. He seems not to have renewed his efforts to acquire the Works upon returning to Rapallo. In fact, a reference to ‘the J. Q. Adams diary’ in a letter he wrote to Olga Rudge on 29 May 1931, soon after his return from Paris, suggests that Pound had moved on from the Works and was either unmotivated or unprepared to make immediate use of the notes he had taken at the Bibliothèque Nationale (ORP, Beinecke, 10, 259).14 Instead, he continued gathering materials for Eleven New Cantos, following a schema he had probably devised at least a year earlier. The broad conflict explored in the American history cantos of the early 1930s is between the clear vision and active minds of enlightened leaders and the distorted vision sponsored by the greed of bankers and arms-merchants. These poems move, with few exceptions, chronologically through the first three generations of American presidents, setting the enlightened intelligence of Jefferson, Adams, Quincy Adams and Van Buren against private interests that are described as ‘deranging the country’s credits’ and as engaging in a ‘betrayal of the nation’ (C, 37/184). Their historical trajectory begins with the American Revolution and the country’s political independence, and concludes with Martin Van Buren’s role in the bank war of the 1830s, which Pound took as a blueprint for how the country might achieve its economic independence from banks of credit, and from the moneyed elite in whose interest they worked.15 John Adams had already been sufficiently well described in Cantos 31–33 to satisfy this sort of schema before Pound’s trip to Paris and, while the Bibliothèque Nationale notes show that he was convinced that more could be learned from Adams’s writings, they did not fit neatly into the fabric of this current project. Pound left Paris, it would seem, feeling much the same way about John Adams as he had five months earlier: ‘the fruits of the Adams [would] be gathered in time’.

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Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos

Both archival evidence and Pound’s publications of the 1930s do, however, confirm that his interest in John Adams remained strong even after he had finished his work on American history for Eleven New Cantos. Pound’s correspondence of these years, as well as the regularity with which he discussed Adams in his prose of the 1930s, testify to this enduring interest. His letters to Olga Rudge during a trip he made to Rome in April 1932, for instance, show that he continued to search for material on John Adams while doing the reading from which he would fashion his portrait of Martin Van Buren for Canto 37. On 20 April 1932 he described his reading of Van Buren’s Autobiography in a way that indicates the extent to which his understanding of this figure was controlled by a single concern. He had ‘ “got at” what he wanted in VB (Bank)’ he told Rudge (ORP, Beinecke, 12, 309). Three days later, a mention of his study of Van Buren’s part in the Bank war was combined with the statement that he was still searching for material on Adams. ‘Mr. Van B quite divertin at moments…’, he remarked. He added that he had found ‘0 on Adams’ (ORP, Beinecke, 12, 309). While he was satisfied, in other words, with a portrayal of Martin Van Buren that was expressly limited to his dealings with the bank, John Adams remained a more complicated figure. Pound’s decision to compose a decad of cantos on John Adams some years later should not, therefore, be seen as a hasty one. Given the seriousness of his engagement with Adams at the beginning of the 1930s, there is no reason to believe that the Adams Cantos were not at least as much the product of a familiarity with the Works and with the thematic and formal questions they raised as they were the product of a desire to respond to the context of international crisis on the eve of World War II. If the Adams Cantos were composed quickly, it was in large part because the major themes and the formal strategies that would be essential to the structure of the section had been taking shape in Pound’s mind well before he actually set about writing the sequence. By the time he finally acquired his copy of the Works of John Adams in 1938, there is no reason to think that he did not have a clear idea of what he hoped to achieve and how he would go about doing it. *** When he did set about composing Cantos LII–LXXI, there is little doubt that, from the earliest stages of his work on the section, Pound conceived it as a diptych bringing together the Chinese emperors and John Adams. References to Adams appear at various points in the manuscript of the Chinese History Cantos.16 Thus, together with material on Mongol rule in China that would be used in Canto 55, the notation ‘J.A.’ is included in a roughly drawn ‘map’, which also mentions ‘China’, the ‘Tartars’, ‘Hellas’ and ‘Roma’ (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4901, 33v).17 Similarly, Pound noted ‘match w/ J. Adams’ in the margin of his manuscript for Canto 61, next to the line ‘1735@58 (13th of reign)’ – information regarding the death of the Emperor Yang Tching (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4903). Equally interesting, and ultimately more important for what it says about the evolution of Pound’s work on The Cantos during these years, is the fact that he seems to have been thinking in terms of a thematic convergence between China and

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John Adams even before he started work on Cantos LII–LXXI. In a letter written to Congressman George Tinkham of Massachusetts on 27 February 1937 (a full two years before the manuscript of the section would be finished), Pound proposed the pairing of precisely these two subjects, telling Tinkham that ‘if you have time for light reading, let me know, and I will send on my notes on J/Adams and the Chinese Emperors’ (EP/ GHT, 113). Philip J. Burns even goes so far as to suggest that the notes to which Pound refers in this letter ‘would eventually become the Chinese (52–61) and Adams (62–71) Cantos’ (EP/GHT, 113 n. 6). Such a direct connection between these ‘notes’ and Cantos LII–LXXI, however, seems highly unlikely.18 Nor is the precise identity of the ‘notes’ Pound offers Tinkham finally of cardinal importance. The letter remains significant because it shows that he was already working to combine the two subjects at this early date, and was confident enough of the thematic relation he was establishing between them to recommend the grouping to so valued a correspondent as Tinkham. Over the previous three years Pound had devoted considerable attention to both John Adams and China, publishing such important essays as ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’ (1937), ‘Immediate Need of Confucius’ (1937), and ‘Mang Tsze (The Ethics of Mencius)’ (1938), to name only the three most substantial pieces. Guide to Kulchur (1938) likewise granted significant space to both Chinese history and Adams (along with the generation of American founders of which he was part). These prose works prepare the ground that he would exploit in Cantos LII–LXXI. Finally, it is worth noting that the cantos Pound wrote during the 1930s prepare the ground for the China–John Adams diptych. In terms of subject matter, the division between the Fifth Decad of Cantos (1937) and Cantos LII–LXXI (1940) is actually much less pronounced than had been the case for previous volumes. A Chinese setting had been reintroduced into The Cantos in Canto 49 (the first return to China since Confucius in Canto 13) and John Adams had reappeared in conjunction with the Leopoldine reforms in Canto 50. Further, the chêng ming (正 名) characters that conclude the Fifth Decad of Cantos (C, 51/252) introduce a central thematic complex of the following section – one that will be identified both with the work of effective emperors and John Adams. Pound, in fact, begins Canto 52 by insisting on the thematic continuity of the new instalment of poems with what has gone before, reminding the reader that ‘I have told you of how things were under Duke / Leopold in Siena / And of the true base of credit’ (C, 52/257) before moving on to new material with the introduction of the Li Ki (the Book of Rites) on the following page. Cantos LII–LXXI may thus be said to stand at the end of a relatively long thematic development within the text of The Cantos. Their thematic and formal palette had been in preparation for the better part of a decade, and it is thus reductive to place excessive emphasis on the specific political context within which they were written.

Pound’s composition of the Adams Cantos When Pound finally set about composing Cantos LII–LXXI he worked with remarkable speed, though not in the uncontrolled hurry that some accounts of the section

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describe. The documentary record of this composition process is imperfect in some respects, but it is complete enough to offer a relatively satisfactory understanding of how Pound worked. Some facts are clear. It is fairly certain, for instance, that Pound began work on the Chinese History Cantos soon after receiving his copy of Joseph de Mailla’s Histoire Générale de la Chine in late November 1937, and that he completed a rough typescript of these poems before he began to make any formal notes for the Adams Cantos.19 By October 1938, at the latest, he had finished drafting the Chinese Cantos and turned his attention to other parts of Cantos LII–LXXI. A letter of 13 October 1938 which Pound sent to Olga Rudge from London, where he had gone to settle the estate of Olivia Shakespear, makes this point clear. He tells Rudge that he gotta start on Canto 61 or thaaarabahts/ i; e; wot is to foller ChinKantos when he gits enough Chinkese to finish ’em and FollowEM. (ORP, Beinecke, 19, 500)

Pound is not more specific about the exact nature of the new material on which he is working. It is entirely possible that what he refers to here as ‘Canto 61’ is unrelated to John Adams. Perhaps he is speaking about a draft of lines that would ultimately be used in Canto 52 (which would explain why he speaks of ‘Canto 61’ and not Canto 62 as being the poem that will follow the Chinese History Cantos).20 Perhaps the reference is simply to a draft of material that was later discarded. In any event, the letter remains an important document since it provides a fairly clear idea of the point at which he finished work on the rough typescripts of the Chinese History Cantos. In the months that follow there are, unfortunately, very few further references to The Cantos in Pound’s correspondence. The next helpful remark comes in a letter to T.S. Eliot on 9 January 1939, where he writes that ‘I am sailin along into the seventh decad. The sixth isn’t polished yet’ (EPP, Beinecke, 15, 670). There can be little doubt that this letter was written very soon after Pound began making the notebook entries of passages culled from his reading of the Works that constitute the first draft of the Adams Cantos. It might be compared with the one contemporary date that is included in the text of these poems, near the end of Canto 62: ‘(11th Jan. 1938)’ (C, 62/350). This, it may be said with near certainty, was a New Year error for 11 January 1939: an instance of the carelessness that has so frustrated Pound’s readers, and an indication that when he told Eliot he was ‘sailin along into the seventh decad’ he had probably made notebook entries for only about half of Canto 62. His completion of the notebook draft of the Adams Cantos can be located even more precisely. On 7 February 1939 he told Olga Rudge that he had finished making notebook entries from the Works, reporting that: ‘he has got to the end of vol. XI and last of J. Adams’ (ORP, Beinecke, 19, 512). And on 12 February he told her that he was ‘rereading his 20 canters / and finished or at any rat got to end of 10 folios Adams/’ (ORP, Beinecke, 19, 513). The manuscript of the Adams Cantos was therefore composed in only approximately five weeks, with a rough typescript of all ten cantos being produced very quickly afterwards. This rough typescript was finished by the end of February, because in a letter to Hubert Creekmore dated February 1939 (the specific day is not given) Pound refers explicitly to ‘Cantos 62/71 now here in rough typescript’ (SL, 417). In a letter dated 6 March, Pound informed Henry Swabey that he

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was ‘retyping Cantos 52/71’ (Nicholls 1984, 112), meaning that the clean typescripts of the Adams Cantos were done during the first half of March. Finally, a letter which Pound wrote to Frank Morley at Faber and Faber, dated ‘20 Marzo ‘39’, assures Morley that ‘bar snags I shall be sendink you the ms/ of CANTERS tomorrow’ (EPP, Beinecke, 50, 2262). Pound corrected proof for the section towards the end of the summer of 1939, and a letter from Larry Pollinger (Pound’s literary agent in London) dated 22 September 1939 informs him that ‘Faber reports that your corrected galleys 1–58 of the CANTOS reached them’ and speaks of waiting to see the remaining proofs with Pound’s corrections ‘as soon as the rest arrive’ (EPP, Beinecke, 41, 1741). Cantos LII– LXXI was published in England by Faber and Faber in January 1940 and in the United States by New Directions in September 1940.21 The great question about the composition of the Adams Cantos that cannot be answered with certitude is how much time Pound devoted to an engagement with the Works of John Adams between the October 1938 letter in which he told Rudge that he had finished drafting the Chinese History Cantos and the January 1939 letter in which he told Eliot that he had begun drafting the Adams Cantos. Pound had finally acquired a set of the Works of John Adams by June 1938 (Moody 1992, 79).22 There is no reference to Pound’s reading of the Works in his correspondence before the January 1939 letter to T.S. Eliot quoted above. Nor are there any markings in Pound’s set of the Works that make it possible to say when exactly he set about reading them for the specific purpose of composing a decad of cantos about John Adams. The markings that Pound did make in his personal copies of the Works, however, suggest that he spent some time working with his source before he began producing the notebook draft of the section in early January. These markings have yet to be described in a detailed way and thus warrant some comment. The best description of the state of Pound’s set of the Works is the concise summary offered by David Moody in his essay ‘Composition in the Adams Cantos’: [Pound’s] set of the Works, now in the Rare Book Room of the Library of the University of Toledo, Ohio, is very lightly marked, as if he had speed-read his way through them. There are many uncut pages, and one volume of Adams’s political writings is unopened. Pound drafted the Cantos in notebooks, working directly from the Works, and then the notebook drafts were typed up into near-final versions. Given the intractable nature of the documentary materials one would expect to find evidence of laborious composition and revision. Amazingly, the first drafting in the notebooks is very near to the final state. (Moody 1992, 79)

The facts of this description are, of course, accurate, and Moody does a fine job of describing the ways in which the state of Pound’s set of the Works and his manuscripts and typescripts fail to conform to what readers might expect. It is important, however, to examine some of the features of the section’s composition in further detail in order to gain a full appreciation of the manner in which Pound worked. While some pages of Pound’s source are indeed uncut, for instance, these are confined to relatively isolated portions of the Works: the majority (although not the

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entire text) of volume five, most of volume six (with the exception of approximately the first thirty pages of Adams’s Discourses on Davila) and about one-eighth of the pages of volume eight. Although Pound’s ignorance of these portions of the Works might seem a ludicrous example of his inability to effectively complete a group of poems that seemingly claim to offer an exhaustive portrait of John Adams, two considerations should be borne in mind before judging his incomplete reading too harshly. First, references to all three of these volumes figure in the notes Pound took at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1931. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the contents of the uncut pages were known to him in at least a general way and that his decisions about what parts of the Works to include in his reading and what parts to ignore were not made blindly. Second, it may be assumed that Pound felt his relatively extensive engagement with the political writings contained in volume four of the Works provided sufficient illustration of the major themes that governed his reading of this portion of Adams’s oeuvre. He was, consequently, eager to move on to the correspondence that he knew to be contained in the later volumes of the Works. At no point in his career can Pound’s use of his sources (whether they be unpublished archival material or published books) be taken as a model of scholarly thoroughness. Typically, he would develop a model that shaped his understanding of a given body of material, and that allowed him to process it in a way that would be meaningful for his poem. He then set about gathering evidence that conformed to this preconceived model. Lawrence Rainey’s description of Pound’s work on the Malatesta Cantos is instructive in this regard: when Pound went to Italy [to consult archival material] he examined all the manuscripts that [Charles] Yriarte had indicated as his sources [in Un Condottière au XVe siècle] – and no others. Pound was not searching for evidence to test or control the claims of Yriarte, assertions that he found congenial and wished to believe himself. Instead he sought manuscripts that could only confirm them. (Rainey 1991, 184)

By the same token, his use of the Works of John Adams is informed not by a desire to construct a well-balanced portrait of John Adams by way of a thorough engagement with a reliable source, but rather by a desire to uncover and organise ‘evidence’ that bolsters his preconceived understanding of Adams’s life and times. Pound describes this attitude very plainly in Guide to Kulchur, when he comments that [t]here is no use trying to ‘understand’ history as a mere haphazard list of events arranged chronologically… . You can on the other hand read almost any biography with some interest if you have some sort of provisory scaffold, hat-rack or something to work from. (GK, 260).

Such an approach is obviously incompatible with responsible historical scholarship. Yet there is no reason why it cannot give rise to highly interesting poetry, as had already been the case in the Malatesta Cantos. The fact that Pound’s engagement with the Works was not what one would expect from a responsible historian need not mean that it was careless from a poetic point of view. He had put in place the ‘provisory scaffold’ that

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shaped his reading of the Works after a relatively long reflection on John Adams and on the formal difficulties that would be posed by such a substantial source as the Works. So, while the markings that Pound made in his set of the Works are indeed lighter than what one would expect were he adopting an analytical approach aimed at achieving a complete and balanced understanding of Adams’s life and times, they nevertheless provide evidence of a purposeful and controlled reading, aimed at uncovering evidence that could be used to substantiate the basic thematic complex upon which he meant the Adams Cantos to be based. In fact, given the manner in which he approached his source, the markings in his books might even be described as relatively heavy, since they register an engagement with far more passages than would ultimately be used in the Adams Cantos. The passages used in the Adams Cantos are generally marked in Pound’s set of the Works (typically in the margin). In most of the volumes a substantial number of passages that were never incorporated into the Adams Cantos are likewise marked. These, it would seem, caught Pound’s attention as he read because they relate to one of the themes he was planning to develop in the poem, but they were discarded later in the composition process. In all, there are well over 1,000 markings in Pound’s set of the Works; a small number when placed in the context of the 8,000 pages over which they are spread, but evidence nonetheless that Pound engaged with his source much more extensively than he is often given credit for doing. There are, of course, reasons for questioning whether Pound’s method constitutes an appropriate response to a text like the Works of John Adams. Yet whatever one’s opinion on this point, there can be no doubt that Pound read extended passages of the Works with great interest and that he approached the text with a strongly felt understanding of the themes and events that would be most meaningful for his poem. The ‘skimmier method’ of which he had spoken in one of his letters from 1931 had been achieved by arriving at a clear sense of the basic elements of what he called the ‘Adams paideuma’, so that as he read he could quickly determine what material was of central importance for his cantos and what was peripheral. With this ‘provisory scaffold’ in place he could read through his source very quickly, identifying possibly useful passages by placing marks in the margins of his books as he went. His previous familiarity with Adams’s writing, both from his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1931 and from his work on previous cantos, facilitated this reading.23 The most interesting markings in Pound’s set of the Works provide a dramatic illustration of the manner in which he read through his source. Inside the back covers of all ten volumes are indexes that Pound drew up while rereading the Works for the first time since 1931. These tables of reference (which are transcribed in full in Appendix C) provided a means of locating important passages as he composed the cantos. They offer a striking illustration of the extent to which his reading of the Works was controlled by a small number of recurring themes. Nearly half of the references in these tables relate to themes such as economic justice, good government or Adams’s attention to precise terminology. Other references are to specific individuals or events, as well as to associations Pound made between passages in the Works and other subjects, such as ‘Kung’, ‘Scot[us] Erig[ena]’ or ‘Muss[olini]’.

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The index Pound inscribed at the back of volume three of his set of the Works, for example, contains the following entries:

158 opry 251 Burgos Salmasius 277 316 Bal. of Power

390 Lafayette 351 [power?]  — 359 Chatham Powers president 410 378 experiment 423 Kung     magnet 381 controlled econ. ids. 577 399 revolution

517

In the table at the back of volume four there are several similar or identical entries. ‘Kung’, for example, is again mentioned, and references to economics and to questions of the balance of power and authority are likewise included: Franklin  19 38 ultima ratio – 132 Wales 144 allegiance to mat. person 178 seal 259 - lit. + gd. humour 297 358 not hereditary 407 Kung 427 Harrington Scot. Erig. 430 433 - (usura?) 466 477 interest

>

In turn, other themes mentioned in this table recur elsewhere in the indexes which Pound inscribed in his volumes of the Works. In the table at the back of his lightly marked copy of volume six, for example, he again listed ‘Usura’, along with ‘constitution’ and ‘Hamilton’. ‘Constitution’, in its turn, recurs in the tables at the back of volumes one, eight and nine. In volume seven the familiar themes of ‘balance’, ‘export and loan’ and ‘debt’ reappear and are coupled with a reference to ‘Lang[uage] + gov[ernment]’. These indexes, together with the relatively large number of passages that are marked in Pound’s set of the Works, but never used in the Adams Cantos, make it seem very likely that Pound read through and marked up his set of the Works before he began taking the manuscript notes that constitute his first draft of the poem. While

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none of the markings that Pound made in his books as he read can be precisely dated, it seems highly unlikely that he would make such markings in parallel with a draft that omits many of the passages they identify. The indexes, moreover, were prepared to facilitate easy reference to specific passages that relate to themes and events which Pound believed he could exploit in his poetry. Yet it is clear from the archival record that once he had completed the manuscript of the sequence Pound made little or no such reference back to his source. The tables of reference thus played no role in helping Pound prepare his rough typescript from the manuscript. Consequently, the only purpose they might have served in the composition process was to facilitate reference back to the source as Pound worked on the manuscript. In this case, they must have been made during a preparatory reading of the Works that predated the start of his composition of the manuscript in January 1939. Volume ten of Pound’s set of the Works provides perhaps the most striking evidence that the markings he made in his books predate the beginning of his work on the manuscript. It is clear from letters which Pound wrote to Olga Rudge on 3 and 7 February 1939 that the canto manuscript based on volume ten of the Works was done in approximately four days (ORP, Beinecke, 19, 512–13). Since only four and a half of the eighty pages of the Adams Cantos are based on material in volume ten, such speed is not surprising in itself. It is quite possible to imagine that Pound, with a

Figure 1.1  The table of reference at the back of Pound’s copy of volume ten of The Life and Works of John Adams (Toledo X). Reproduced courtesy of the Ward M. Canaday Center for Special Collections, University of Toledo, Ohio.

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manuscript that already filled more than four notebooks, approached this final volume of his source seeking material that would concisely bring together themes already amply illustrated elsewhere in the manuscript. The markings in his copy of volume ten of the Works, however, show that he engaged extensively and in great detail with this book. They are relatively heavy throughout and pertain to several times the number of passages he used in the Adams Cantos. The index at the back of this volume is, in fact, the most extensive one in Pound’s entire set, referring to numerous passages that were never used and giving a very full sense of the subjects Pound considered as he read. It is difficult to imagine why Pound would have taken such care to identify this system of interrelated references, only to discard the majority of them a day or two later. Likewise, it seems incredible that he would provide himself with a table he could use to locate passages he considered to be especially important, only to turn in a matter of days to the production of a rough typescript that was made directly from the manuscript and that shows no sign of the slightest return to the source. Indeed, the simple quantity of work required to engage with volume ten of the Works in the way Pound’s markings suggest he did, while at the same time producing the canto manuscript based on the volume, makes it seem improbable that the entire process took place in only four days. So, while it is impossible to be categorical about this feature of the composition history of the Adams Cantos, the evidence is very strong that Pound read through and annotated his set of the Works before beginning to produce his manuscript of the sequence at the beginning of January 1939. *** The above evidence establishes a picture of the genesis and composition of the Adams Cantos that is significantly different from what has generally been described, making it necessary to rethink certain assumptions about the speed of Pound’s composition and the supposed carelessness of his engagement with the Works. When Pound first began to think about John Adams in the early 1930s, in the context of his work on the American history cantos of that time, he did not see him simply as a figure of secondary importance to Thomas Jefferson. Instead, he saw very quickly that Adams possessed a different character and represented a different political and social vision from that of Jefferson. While he was at pains to stress points of convergence between the two men in Eleven New Cantos, he was also already conscious of the fact that ‘the fruits of the Adams’ would be different from those of Jefferson. His curiosity about the figure was strong enough for him to seek out the Works of John Adams in the Bibliothèque Nationale during his visit to Paris in 1931. This encounter with the text gave him a general understanding of its organisation, a feeling for the themes it would allow him to explore and a sense of the formal problems that would be posed by any attempt to make use of this source in The Cantos. He remained interested enough in John Adams to speak of searching for further information regarding him a year later, and by 1937 he was working towards a thematic grouping of John Adams and Chinese history/Confucian philosophy in The Cantos. When Pound did finally set about writing a group of cantos on the life and times

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of John Adams, he most likely began by returning to the Works some time between October and December 1938, reading and marking the volumes he had acquired. Once he had finished this preliminary reading, he then went back through the Works a second time, using the notations he had made to help him produce a manuscript of the Adams Cantos – one that consisted essentially of passages copied directly from the source. This manuscript was written with the remarkable speed that has disconcerted so many of Pound’s readers – in about five weeks, between early January and mid-February 1939. Both the rough and the clean typescripts of the Adams Cantos were then produced shortly after the manuscript was finished, in the last weeks of February and the first weeks of March 1939. In all, the composition of the Adams Cantos must thus have taken somewhere between three and five months, depending upon the amount of time Pound devoted to reading and marking his copy of the Works in the final months of 1938. It drew, however, upon reflections that had been ongoing for the better part of a decade. If the Adams Cantos are to be fully appreciated it is thus necessary that they be related to Pound’s other concerns of that time and to broader developments in his source-based poetics.

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2

‘Including History’: The Evolution of Ezra Pound’s Documentary Method in the 1920s and 1930s In terms of their poetic technique, the Adams Cantos can be most profitably read in terms of an evolution of the documentary method which Pound first began to utilise in the early 1920s. Pound’s technique of integrating found material from pre-existing prose documents into his poem was first employed in the Malatesta Cantos (8–11). The manner in which he exploited this method in those poems has been thoroughly described by Lawrence Rainey in his study Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos.1 Pound’s documentary poetics, however, evolved significantly over the course of his career. It is thus regrettable that his use of this method in other cantos of the 1920s and 1930s has not received the same sort of attention as Rainey and others have given to the Malatesta Cantos.2 If so many readers have found Cantos LII–LXXI disconcertingly different from earlier instalments of The Cantos this is largely because Pound’s documentary poetics evolved in dramatic and surprising ways during the 1930s. By the time he came to write the Adams Cantos, Pound’s documentary strategies resulted in his original poetic voice being almost totally subsumed by the sources from which he worked, disappearing with little comment into canto after canto of text-based history. One hundred and eighty-six pages in all. Some aspects of this evolution of Pound’s documentary method should not take readers by surprise. The presentation of significant historical moments had always been an important part of The Cantos and, at least since Canto 8 (the first of the Malatesta Cantos), Pound’s treatment of history had involved transposing prose documents directly into his poetry, either from archives or from published sources. From a very early stage in the poem’s development, Pound had also devoted blocks of two or more cantos to those historical complexes which he considered most essential to his project: four cantos to Sigismondo Malatesta, two to Venetian history and three to the Monte dei Paschi bank in Siena and the Leopoldine reforms, for example. Yet in spite of such methodological similarities between Cantos LII–LXXI and earlier portions of The Cantos, Pound’s handling of Imperial Chinese and Revolutionary American history remains surprising. Instead of brief, penetrating glances into the past, organised around a central complex like the Tempio Malatestiano or the Siena Bank, readers of the Chinese and Adams Cantos are confronted with entirely uninterrupted sequences of source-based history. In earlier instalments of The Cantos it had been possible to read Pound’s documentary writing within the context of broader poetic endeavours. The prose documents with

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which Pound worked had not carried the burden of his poetry on their own prior to Cantos LII–LXXI, but were rather valuable for their ability to interact effectively with other modes of writing. Hence, for example, Donald Davie’s insistence that Pound’s documentary poetry be read in terms of its relation to other threads in the poetic fabric of The Cantos. The lyrical and visionary element in Canto 45, Davie claims, would be ‘worthless because it is unscientific unless we can see how the conclusions to be drawn arise unavoidably from the case in point … documented [in the preceding cantos] from Tuscan history’ (Davie 1965, 169).3 In such a reading, the historical documents which Pound exploits do not themselves contain the essential vision of his poetry. Rather, they provide the necessary foundation for poetic statements that will be made in other, non-documentary modes of writing. This way of thinking about Pound’s documentary method has proved very influential and it continues to characterise much criticism on the subject. In 2001, for example, Ian Bell described the place of the documentary poems in the Fifth Decad of Cantos as follows: The cultural work performed by the proclamations of Cantos XLV and XLVI, and based on the documentation gathered by Cantos XLII–XLIV, prepares for the mythic and erotic dimensions of Canto XLVII which indicate the fertile visionary world that for Pound may function as a counter to a contemporaneity broken by usury and belligerence. We need to stress, with Donald Davie, that the visionary element is worked for through the preceding Cantos: it is not a matter of transcendental release. (Bell 2001, 94)

Such a model for understanding Pound’s documentary poetics, however, is ill-adapted to Cantos LII–LXXI, where ‘documentation’ is very plainly not gathered in order to prepare the ground for other poetic modes. Rather, it stands alone, asserting its status as a self-sufficient mode of poetic discourse. Clearly, Pound’s estimation of the role that documentary writing could occupy in the formal repertoire of The Cantos evolved over the years. It is therefore not adequate to think in terms of a single ‘documentary method’ that he elaborated in the early 1920s when he wrote the Malatesta Cantos and that he continued to exploit, sometimes in expanded form, over the remainder of his career. In fact, Pound’s use of historical documents in his poetry underwent qualitative changes over the course of his career. To appreciate the documentary poetics which he employed in the Adams Cantos it is therefore important to first clarify what it was Pound hoped to achieve with his documentary method and then to examine the stages in the evolution of this method, from its first appearance in the Malatesta Cantos to its most extended use in the Adams Cantos.

Historical documents and poetic vision in Pound’s Cantos Readers of The Cantos who point out the relation between Pound’s documentary poetics and what Ian Bell calls the ‘visionary element’ in his work identify an

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important feature of Pound’s writing. From its very earliest appearance in the Malatesta Cantos, the documentary method was based on the premise that material structures such as the Tempio Malatestiano, the Ducal Palace in Venice or the Monte dei Paschi bank can give definite, concrete form to an ethos or a set of ideas. Yet it is doubtful whether Pound ever understood this relation to be one that involved the use of evidence to accede to a position from which the ‘visionary element’ could be more effectively introduced, as readings such as Davie’s imply. Rather, the struggle in which Pound repeatedly engaged as he experimented with documentary techniques was that of using documentation to give a definite form to what would have otherwise remained an insubstantial vision. Document and vision thus function as part of a single poetic complex. The documentary method may thus be described as a positive adaptation of William Blake’s injunction to ‘Giv[e] a body to Falshood [so] that it may be cast off for ever’ (Blake 1982, 155). For Pound, much of the method’s value lies in its potential to give form to states of mind or complexes of ideas that existed in the past, thereby preserving them and allowing them to maintain an active presence in contemporary life. He neatly summarised this attitude in ‘A Visiting Card’ (1942) when he held up the material construction of the Roman state as being valuable because it was the concrete form to which divine ‘amor’ clung: R O M A O M M O A M O R Above all this, the substantiality of the soul, and the substantiality of the gods. (SP, 327)

Pound’s experiments with documentary writing are motivated at least as much by the sensibility expressed in such statements as they are by his concern for historical accuracy. The documentation of Roman history and the celebration of ‘amor’, in such a conception, are part of a single poetic complex. And, as Pound’s confidence in his documentary method grew, he gradually moved away from the practice of interweaving transcriptions of pre-existing documents with material presented in other poetic modes. Instead, he relied on the direct and uninterrupted use of sourcebased material to present the historical complexes he included in The Cantos. In the documentary cantos of the 1920s Pound had experimented with strategies that allowed him to explore the interdependence of material evidence and insubstantial vision. He focused on monuments which offered enduring reminders of the ethos that had animated a specific historical moment: most notably the Tempio Malatestiano in Cantos 8–11 and the Ducal Palace in Cantos 25–26. Pound saw in the Tempio that Sigismondo Malatesta left in Rimini a material record of his struggle to shape a meaningful order out of the chaos of his harried life. Its presence made it possible for Pound to evaluate the scraps of documentary evidence he encountered relating to Sigismondo’s life and times, and to gather them into a meaningful poetic order. A

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similar poetic ambition is at work in the John Adams Cantos. Pound believed that Adams’s Works were a kind of monument too – a monument to what, in a 1939 article for the Japan Times, Pound termed ‘the most perfect [idea] that could be carried into action’, that of ‘good government’ (EPCP VIII, 15). By employing documentary poetic techniques in the Adams Cantos, Pound sought to rigorously present the material record of Adams’s struggle to improve the public life of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America, while at the same time relating the insubstantial vision of good government that motivated this activity. Pound’s past work in the documentary mode had taught him to appreciate both the difficulties and the advantages of using historical documents in his poetry. It is in the nature of historical documents, as he had learned from his earliest experiments with them in the Malatesta Cantos, to offer a fragmented narrative surface and to memorialise a past situation.4 Two difficulties are thus immediately presented to the poet who attempts to use them as the raw material for his or her work. First, their tendency towards narrative fragmentation must be overcome by a contrary force, which will work to bind them into a coherent artistic vision. Second, the pastness of the material they memorialise must be overcome by a demonstration of its pertinence to the present if the poetry is not to fall into simple nostalgia. The documents which the poet uses must, in other words, be double-edged if they are to be effective. They must memorialise past occurrences in such a way as to give them a material form and, in so doing, they must reveal the ideas or concepts that cling to that form and that remain meaningful and useful in the present. While it posed important challenges, the documentary method must have seemed to Pound, for exactly these reasons, to offer a poetic mode that could be at once visionary and objective; combining the late Romantic, aestheticist elements in his verse with the precise presentation of concrete detail he had celebrated since his early Imagist writing.5 That Pound was pondering such a formal model as he considered the importance of Adams’s and Jefferson’s writing is apparent from the description he gives of their correspondence in his much-quoted 1937 essay, ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’. He reminds his reader here that: ‘As monument’ or I should prefer to say as a still workable dynamo, left us from the real period, nothing surpasses the Jefferson correspondence. Or to reduce it to convenient bulk concentrating on the best of it, and its fullest implications, nothing surpasses the evidence that CIVILISATION WAS in America, than the series of letters exchanged between Jefferson and John Adams, during the decade of reconciliation after their disagreements. (SP, 147)

He understands the correspondence between the two men, in other words, as being a monument that memorialises essential facts about the ‘real period’ of American history: providing material evidence ‘that CIVILISATION WAS in America’. Yet he also suggests that as this evidence is pieced together and the reader begins to achieve a sense of the civilisation that informs the Adams–Jefferson correspondence, the pastness of the documents will vanish. The pertinence of Jefferson’s and Adams’s vision

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to contemporary society will become clear as one reads and, instead of conceiving of the correspondence as a shrine or a monument that memorialises the past, it will come to be seen as ‘a still workable dynamo’. The material record upon which knowledge of the past depends does not simply serve a memorial function. It is not ‘merely something lost in dim retrospect, a tombstone, tastily carved, whereon to shed dry tears or upon which to lay a few withered violets’ (ibid.). Rather, these documents offer ‘possibilities of revival, starting perhaps with a valorisation of our cultural heritage’ (ibid.). The Jefferson–Adams ‘monument’, in other words, is valuable insofar as it gives form to an otherwise abstract concept, allowing contemporary readers to grasp it as a dynamic force that remains capable of influencing the contemporary situation. This conception of documentary poetics as a means of bridging the gap between the memorialising function filled by historical monuments and the dynamic action of intelligence at work in the present dates at least from Pound’s earliest work on the Malatesta Cantos. In one early draft of that section, Pound described his relationship to the historical complex he was trying to present in his poetry as follows: The living effigies, in their shrine, And I a thousand beauties there beheld. In their shrine, the temples, the temples of gold. And of ivory. Past victories of the soul. (EPP, Beinecke, 70, 3147)6

These lines were written before Pound had fully worked out the formal repertoire of the Malatesta Cantos. He consequently relied far more heavily on first-person presentation than he would in the final version of those cantos.7 The historical understanding that informs these lines, however, offers instructive insights into the final form of the Malatesta Cantos, and it might be profitably compared with Pound’s later comments on the Jefferson–Adams correspondence being ‘a shrine and monument’. In this lyrical passage from the Malatesta Cantos drafts, as in the 1937 essay on the Jefferson–Adams correspondence, the ‘shrine’ Pound evokes paradoxically contains ‘living effigies’. These allow him to ‘[behold] … past victories of the soul’ and also make use of them as ‘still workable dynamo[s]’ for his own time. In both cases, the material framework of a historical shrine or monument (be it a literal monument such as the Tempio Malatestiano, or a figurative monument like the written record of the Jefferson–Adams correspondence) gives a tangible form to something that would otherwise remain insubstantial. In the passage from the early drafts of the Malatesta Cantos, this insubstantial element is expressed as ‘victories of the soul’. Pound is still groping in this fragmentary lyric to achieve a suitable method for presenting the significance of the Tempio Malatestiano to his reader. He has, however, already come to picture the Tempio as the concrete manifestation of a unique vision: a monument that gives form to what was most valuable at a specific historical moment and that thus stands out from the remaining mass of contradictory documents which survived from that time. In the Venetian Cantos (which are the next extended documentary presentation

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of a specific historical complex in The Cantos), Pound again struggled to present the relationship between immaterial concepts and the physical forms to which they cling. He reflects openly on this relationship in the extended lyric that is interposed within documentation relating to the construction of the Ducal Palace in Canto 25. Here, Pound contrasts the ability of concrete forms – rigorously defined and clearly perceived – to hold ‘gods … in the air’, with ‘dead concepts’ that remain entirely insubstantial: And as after the form, the shadow, Noble forms, lacking life, that bolge, that valley the dead words keeping form, and the cry: Civis Romanus. The clear air, dark, dark, The dead concepts, never the solid, the blood rite, … And against this the flute: pone metum. Fading, that they carried their guts before them, And thought then, the deathless, Form, forms and renewal, gods held in the air, Forms seen, and then clearness, Bright void, without image, Napishtim, Casting his gods back into the nouς. (C, 25/118–19)

In Canto 25, far more explicitly than in the Malatesta Cantos, the interaction of material form and insubstantial concepts is linked to the question of good government. This association is even more evident in the manuscript draft of the passage quoted above. Here, Pound associated the structure of the state with a struggle to perceive and maintain ‘life in the form’: the noble forms, moving, forms noble, now empty The concepts … lo stato, justice, wise action, thought out, blared out with trumpets, now empty: and from the quarries, lamenting: sero, sero revocatus. No form achieved, no house, greed, greed, acquisition … Utnapishtim cut stone steps in the aether: Now the form, crystal, neptuno, the wave rise crystal, forms, as if sculpted in crystal, based, based in that crystal, fluid, and then the form, and the life in the form. (EPP, Beinecke, 72, 3212, p. 6)

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In this pre-publication version of the passage, Pound was already working to link the struggle to connect abstract concepts to material forms with the sort of attention to the machinery of government that he would describe far more extensively in the Adams Cantos. A loss of civic order is associated in these lines with ‘dead words keeping form’, in a gesture that relates the precise definition of terminology to the general health of the state. In so doing, it anticipates the chêng ming (正名) motif that would be such an important part of the Adams Cantos. Visionary moments of the sort that Pound evokes in his ecstatic description of ‘Napishtim / Casting his gods back into the nouς’ can, it is claimed in this passage, be achieved only if one is in possession of an understanding of forms that are fixed, ‘as if sculpted in crystal’. And such fixed forms are understood to provide the only meaningful basis for the productive exercise of the intellect. In Canto 25 Pound uses a musical metaphor to put forward these ideas. Thus, dead words and dead forms are contrasted to a flute whose stops can be manipulated to shape the breath into precisely executed musical notes. The canto includes an image of notes as facets of air, and the mind there, before them, moving, so that notes needed not move. (C, 25/119)

According to the terms of this image, productive thought depends upon the rigorous definition of the concepts over which the mind ranges. In the manuscript drafts of Canto 25 such reflections were developed alongside the question of the precise definition of terminology that would be such a fundamental part of Pound’s work over the decade and a half that followed. The clearest expression of this direction of Pound’s thought may be found in a note in the Venetian Cantos manuscripts on what he called the ‘precipitation of terms’: Precipitation of terms. a

word caught as term

b

clarification of terminology. Terms fixed in relation to one another. (EPP, Beinecke, 72, 3212)

Pound’s documentary poetics in the Malatesta and Venetian Cantos While it has become commonplace to speak of Pound’s ‘documentary method’ of including fragments of prose documents in The Cantos, this method is typically seen as a more or less stable part of Pound’s poetic repertoire. It should be noted, however, that from its first appearance in the Malatesta Cantos to its last extended use in

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the Coke Cantos, Pound’s documentary poetics underwent a number of significant changes. Pound’s first experiments with the documentary method in the Malatesta Cantos have been universally recognised as a crucial event in the development of the formal palette of The Cantos. As Lawrence Rainey contends, the composition of the Malatesta Cantos marked a catalytic moment. It enabled Pound to discover poetic techniques essential to the formal repertory of The Cantos, such as the direct quotation of prose documents, a device that effectively dissolved the distinction between verse and prose – a crucial development in the history of modern poetry. Equally important, the Malatesta Cantos precipitated a radical revision of all the earlier cantos, crystallising the design of the longer poem, which had until then remained obscure for Pound himself. (Rainey 1991, 4)

If such ‘crystallising’ was brought about by Pound’s work on the Malatesta Cantos it was because the formal advances he achieved in these poems allowed him to refine the strategies he had employed in earlier cantos. Instead of the first-person narration of historical events that unfold beneath a speaker in an arena, or the use of a showman derived from Browning’s ‘Sordello’, or the radical juxtaposition of short lyrical passages, superimposed upon one another, ‘ply over ply’ as in Canto 4, the reader of the Malatesta Cantos is confronted with scraps of incomplete narrative and fragmentary prose documents and expected to make sense of them. Attempts to attach a clear source to any given utterance are frequently frustrated, and the sort of clear thematic progression that had generally characterised the earlier cantos is undermined in favour of a dissonance that imitates the heterogeneity of the historical record. Peter Makin has very usefully summarised the material that confronts the reader of the Malatesta Cantos as follows: The texture of [the] section shows a sea of the particular. We come at the action through torn letters … Contracts, bills of sale, verses, architectural memos, a letter from the slighted Isotta, a formal complaint concerning the theft of marble, a receipt for damages incurred in the same, letters proposing treachery, letters between third parties, formal denunciations: documents. This batch of Cantos is the first in which is thrust at the reader a sheaf of documents, of non-homogenised history. (Makin 1985, 143)

Makin does an excellent job here of describing the reactions of a reader confronted for the first time with Pound’s documentary poetics. But what is most pertinent for the present study is not the heterogeneous nature of the material Pound employs in the Malatesta Cantos, but rather Makin’s perception that, striking as they may be, the documents which confront the reader of these cantos are placed at the service of a broader poetic project. ‘We come at the action’ by way of the documents which Pound presents; which is to say that the documents themselves do not carry the primary weight of the sequence. Rather, they serve to augment material that is presented

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in other poetic modes. The documents give specific, fragmentary evidence that anchors Pound’s treatment of history in the gristly details of the historical moment he describes, but they do not offer a complete picture of this moment on their own. Consider, for example, the following passage from Canto 10: As Filippo Strozzi wrote to Zan Lottieri, then in Naples, “I think they’ll let him through at Campiglia” Florence, Archivio Storico, 4th series t. iii, e “La Guerra dei Senesi col conte di Pitigliano.” And he found Carlo Gonzaga sitting like a mud-frog in Orbetello And he said: “Caro mio, I can not receive you It really is not the moment.” And Broglio says he ought to have tipped Gorro Lolli. But he got back home here somehow, And Piccinino was out of a job, And the old row with Naples continued. (C, 10/42–43)

The documentary material in this passage, while conspicuous as a new element in the poetic repertoire of The Cantos, is ultimately quite limited in its range. Only three of the thirteen lines in the passage may be adequately described as documentary fragments: ‘“I think they’ll let him through at Campiglia” / Florence, Archivio Storico, 4th series t. iii, e / “La Guerra dei Senesi col conte di Pitigliano.”’ These fragments, far from determining the shape of Pound’s writing as they interact with other such documentary fragments in a non-hierarchical manner, are rigidly framed by a narrative voice that far exceeds them both in the space it occupies and the range it possesses. This narrative voice serves numerous purposes in the passage quoted above. It introduces documents (‘As Filippo Strozzi wrote to Zan Lotteri, then in Naples’). It engages in the poetic description of events (‘And he found Carlo Gonzaga sitting like a mud-frog / in Orbetello’). It summarises material contained in historical accounts (‘And Broglio says he ought to have tipped Gorro Lolli’). And it provides a broad historical framework into which the more specific pieces of information can be meaningfully fitted (‘And the old row with Naples continued’). The documentary material in the passage, on the other hand, is given insufficient substance to generate meaning independently and is placed within a rigidly defined context that determines how it must be read. Its presence enriches the historical account Pound offers in the section, permitting the inclusion of highly specific details about Malatesta’s life and times, and about the archives in which these details are recorded. Yet it would be a serious mistake to assume that the documents Pound includes either increase the objectivity of his account or fundamentally transform the role of the reader by granting him or her licence to interpret a sheaf of heterogeneous documentary fragments as he or she sees fit. The temptation is strong, once one has recognised the Malatesta Cantos as the site where Pound first began to experiment with strategies that would be of seminal

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importance to twentieth-century poetry, to read the section primarily in terms of this formal development, and in so doing grant the documents a centrality they do not, in fact, possess, while neglecting the broader poetic framework into which they are inserted. Marjorie Perloff, for example, after rightly insisting on the importance of the new poetic strategies introduced in the Malatesta Cantos, goes on to assert that the section may be characterised as a flat surface, as in a Cubist or early Dada collage, upon which verbal elements, fragmented images, and truncated bits of narrative, drawn from the most disparate contexts, are brought into collision. (Perloff 1981, 181)

The surface of the Malatesta Cantos, however, is anything but flat. On the contrary, it is intricately layered so as to rigidly contextualise the ‘fragmented images’ and ‘truncated bits of narrative’ it presents. The collisions between such fragments are orchestrated so as to leave little doubt as to which ones should be privileged and which, shown to be hollow or illusory, should be disregarded.8 It is important that these limitations of Pound’s use of documents in the Malatesta Cantos be taken fully into account if one is to appreciate the evolution of his documentary poetics in the following decades. In order to present this evolution in as succinct a manner as possible, it is useful (albeit somewhat reductive) to think of Pound’s documentary cantos as employing three distinct poetic modes. First, there is a lyrical mode, which functions outside history and is used to describe those moments when the material circumstances of a given historical complex modulate into a vision of timeless ideas or principles. Second, there is a narrative mode, which is tied to the chronological march of historical events but is not confined to the citation of written documents. It therefore maintains the flexibility needed to summarise heterogeneous material in a unified account or to dramatise a given event. Finally, there is a documentary mode, which functions within the space delineated by a written text which Pound has found either in a published book or in the course of archival research. At the time he wrote the Malatesta Cantos, Pound’s documentary poetics relied on the interplay of these three modes. He extracted poetry from seemingly sterile documentary fragments by placing them within a framework that gives them unexpected resonance. He did not, however, allow them to determine the shape of his poetry. The poetic possibilities offered by the interweaving of these three modes of writing are beautifully illustrated by Pound’s description of the renovation of the Ducal Palace in Canto 25: 1409 … since the most serene Doge can scarce stand upright in his bedroom … vadit pars, two gross lire stone stair, 1415, for pulchritude of the palace 254 da parte de non 23 4 non sincere

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Which is to say: they built out over the arches and the palace hangs there in the dawn, the mist, in that dimness, or as one rows in from past the murazzi the barge slow after moon-rise and the voice sounding under the sail. (C, 25/117)

Here such specific pieces of information as the number of votes for and against the improvements to the palace are presented in the documentary mode (sometimes in translation), then qualified by the narrative mode, which plainly relates the fact of the building, before modulating into the lyrical mode, which carries the poem into the realm of timeless beauty. The passage is rendered with an exquisite lightness of touch, shifting from the presentation of historical records relating to the Ducal Palace’s renovation to a vision of the intemporal beauty that clings to the form of the palace. In so doing, it dramatises the way in which such vision depends on the mind’s interaction with material forms inherited from the past. The other side of this equation is that the understanding of history is conditioned by the limitations of the historical record. It is, as a result, necessarily partial. Pound’s use of the documentary method in the 1920s registers a strong awareness of this fact. Explicitly recognised at the beginning of the Malatesta section, and remaining apparent throughout, is the fact that, while documents may be used to support the portrayal of Malatesta in these cantos and to add a further layer to their poetic diction, there are serious limitations to the historical record. Pound knows it to be irrevocably fragmentary and is conscious that, in addition to ‘luminous details’, it contains much material that would obscure his argument.9 Historical documents are useful insofar as they illustrate a given point or help to relate the unique colour of another time and place, but they must be carefully situated in relation to non-documentary material if they are to be meaningful. There is nothing new about this ambiguous stance. As early as 1915, in ‘Papyrus’, Pound had noted the partiality of a written record that leaves the contemporary reader to derive what meaning she or he may from such fragments as: Spring Too long Gongula

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . (P, 115)

In the Malatesta Cantos, Pound insists from the moment he introduces historical documents into his poem that the evidence they provide is fragmentary and drawn from an incomplete and self-contradictory record. He stages his inclusion of documents in the poem in a way that recognises their inability to offer a complete historical construct independently from other modes of writing. Canto 8 begins by demanding that the reader confront the fragmentary nature of the historical record, making a gesture identical to the one in ‘Papyrus’. A torn letter is reproduced to dramatise the gulf that exists between provable facts and epic poetry (‘Truth and Calliope’):

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These fragments you have shelved (shored). “Slut!” “Bitch!” Truth and Calliope Slanging each other sous les lauriers: That Alessandro was negroid. And Malatesta Sigismund: Frater tamquam Et compater carissime: tergo …hanni de …dicis …entia Equivalent to: Giohanni of the Medici, Florence. (C, 8/28)

This sets the tone for the way Pound uses documents throughout the Malatesta Cantos. The fragments that he relates in the documentary mode are drawn from such manifestly random sources as Sigismondo Malatesta’s intercepted post-bag (C, 9/37–41) or such obviously incomplete documents as a page apparently torn from the Commentaries of Pope Pius II (C, 10/43–4). Contextualised within material related in the narrative mode, which occupies by far the greatest space in the sequence, these fragments fill in details of the historical picture Pound offers and point out certain epistemological difficulties. They participate in an effort to develop a mode of poetic expression that might negotiate between ‘Truth and Calliope’. This is indeed of seminal importance both to the formal development of The Cantos and to the broader evolution of twentieth-century poetry. Yet it would be a mistake to exaggerate the place that documentary material occupies in the Malatesta Cantos or to think that its randomness and fragmentation are reproduced in the broad structure of the sequence. There is nothing fragmentary, for instance, about the description of Sigismondo’s activities given near the end of Canto 8: With the church against him, With the Medici bank for itself, With wattle Sforza against him Sforza Francesco, wattle-nose, Who married him (Sigismondo) his (Francesco’s) Daughter in September, Who stole Pèsaro in October (as Broglio says “bestialmente”), Who stood with the Venetians in November, With the Milanese in December, Sold Milan in November, stole Milan in December Or something of that sort, Commanded the Milanese in the spring, the Venetians at midsummer, The Milanese in the autumn,

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And was Naples’ ally in October, He, Sigismundo, templum ædificavit (C, 8/32)

Here, the poetic negotiation between ‘Truth and Calliope’ is handled almost exclusively in the narrative mode. The voice that presents this summary of events makes an effort to engage with the historical record (‘as Broglio says’), yet it is not confined to any single account, and it works primarily to collect a variety of details into a unified description of Malatesta’s life. Pound can summarise Sigismondo’s career from the position this mode allows him to assume, but as his tongue-in-cheek sorting out of details (‘him (Sigismondo) his (Francesco’s)’) and the vague ‘Or something of that sort’ demonstrate, he is also aware of the necessary imprecision involved in such a strategy. What justifies it is the central fact towards which the account is directed: ‘He, Sigismundo, templum ædificavit.’ It is the material presence of this monument that resolves the tension between ‘Truth and Calliope’ in the passage, reconciling them by way of its presence, which transcends the historical moment of its building. Indeed, far from presenting the flat surface of a collage, the Malatesta Cantos are organised according to an elaborate and strictly hierarchical framework. The Tempio stands at the centre of a narrative current upon which bits and pieces of more or less reliable documentary matter are carried, and these documents, while a conspicuous feature of Pound’s poetry, have meaning only insofar as they relate to the Tempio. Pound’s hope, in adopting such a strategy, is that the fragmentary, heterogeneous records of Malatesta’s career may be brought together in a coherent poetic whole, just as the Tempio Malatestiano emerged from the chaos of Sigismondo’s life. Rebecca Beasley admirably summarises Pound’s attitude in the section as follows: The Cantos is a collage only in so far as it fails, as Michael André Bernstein has succinctly remarked … The Malatesta Cantos do not anticipate the poem’s failure, however; rather their importation of extra-poetic material is a gesture of supreme self-confidence in the individual’s constructive powers, whether those powers belong to Pound, to Sigismondo, or Mussolini. (Beasley 2007a, 203–4)

When one examines the textual history of the Malatesta Cantos it is clear that from his earliest drafts Pound sought to place the Tempio Malatestiano at the centre of a poetic structure capable of negotiating between material fact and enlightened vision. His association of it with a ‘shrine’ that held ‘living effigies’ and permitted the poet to ‘behold / past victories of the soul’ in the manuscript draft cited above offers an instructive glimpse of this project in a primitive form. In addition, as Lawrence Rainey has shown, as Pound gathered material for the sequence, he organised it based on his understanding of what the Tempio Malatestiano represented. When he began work on what he assumed would be a single Malatesta Canto, he did so with a relatively simple formal model in mind: His earliest plan …, as indicated by a note at the end of [his first] draft …, was simple: ‘Sigismund === or Francesco.’ It called for a contrast between Sforza’s

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concentration on affairs of state and Sigismondo’s patronage of ‘art,’ between the transient and the eternal. (Rainey 1991, 118)

Pound must have very quickly realised, however, that such a contrast was anything but simple. At issue were two distinctly different models for understanding history: one strictly material, the other involving a negotiation between the transient and the atemporal, born of a desire to ‘gather from the air a live tradition’ (C, 81/536) and give it material form in a specific setting. In the sheaf of notes and drafts which Pound produced for the Malatesta Cantos it is obvious that the Tempio stands at the crossroads between these two models for engaging with history. Sometimes in these drafts Pound foregrounds its status as the actualisation of a vision that has been passed on to Sigismondo from Greece and Provence, while at others he describes it as the product of Sigismondo’s active struggle against the material constraints of his own time. This dual status allows it to function as a figure for what Pound hoped to accomplish in his poetry. The relation between material form and atemporal vision is most concisely stated in Canto 25, where Pound speaks of ‘forms and renewal, [that hold] gods … in the air’ (C, 25/119). In the Malatesta Cantos, such ideas are less explicitly stated, but they nevertheless offer a running subtext to Pound’s portrayal of Renaissance Italy. He experiments, for example, with the idea that the Byzantine Neoplatonist philosopher Gemisthus Plethon was the carrier of a religious vision to which Sigismondo gave form when he built the Tempio. In the published text of the Malatesta Cantos this connection is made by way of a passing reference to: ‘the old sarcophagi, / such as lie, smothered in grass, by San Vitale’ (C, 9/41). These lines evoke Sigismondo’s re-interment of Plethon’s ashes in the Tempio upon his return from a military campaign in the Peloponnesus, and therefore link his construction of ‘a temple … full of pagan works’ (ibid.) to Neoplatonism and to Greek mythology. In Pound’s manuscripts, the importance of Gemisthus Plethon and his relationship to the Tempio is stated far more overtly. The following description of the Tempio’s construction may be found, for example, in one of Pound’s manuscript drafts: But arose: templum magnificum. He built a splendid church, so full of gentile images, you wd. have said, tis to Gemisthus’ gods, and not of our religion (EPP, Beinecke, 70, 3145)10

And, in a related draft, Pound wrote: …and the point is the man built his temple and the point is that Gemisthus was in Florence, preaching the gods, and the point is: the wall, and the broken arch. (EPP, Beinecke, 70, 3145)

In such passages, Pound experiments with ways of relating the material fact of

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Sigismondo’s ‘splendid church’ – its wall and broken arch – to the insubstantial vision preached by Gemisthus Plethon. As Peter Liebregts comments, the Tempio … was in Pound’s view an illustration of the artistic use of Neoplatonic concepts, of beliefs going into action. This actualization of Ideas in concrete forms might induce man to recognize its true worth and beauty, and thus serve as a means to attain his true Self. (Liebregts 2004, 159)

Similarly, in several early drafts of the sequence, the Tempio was portrayed as a concretisation of the artistic sensibility that informed Provençal song. A passage in one such draft reads, for example: Viel and ribibi, Guillaume of Aquitaine The Count of Poictiers Brought up with him from Spain And skill in singing,

Lay on his saddle bags, Rich spill of orient,

All in the pouch, enough for a man’s back, And Sigismundo, with a heavier load, the city, the urbs, the court, life in a setting. (EPP, Beinecke, 70, 3147)

Another, in a more sweeping statement of the same theme, describes Charlemagne, Poictiers, bringing his jongleurs, and viel players out of Spain but here in Rimini, the voice, the stone, e gai saber. behind it all, the urge to refound the world. (EPP, Beinecke, 70, 3149, p. 2)11

Informing Pound’s efforts to associate Gemisthus Plethon and Guillaume of Aquitaine with Malatesta’s Tempio is the notion that the Tempio gave concrete form to two elements that had been crucial to earlier cantos: ‘song from the south’ and ‘light from Eleusis’. He sought to situate this monument at the point of intersection between Sigismondo’s dealings with his own time and his response to enduring ideas inherited from other traditions. In the passage quoted above, Pound’s attempt to present the monument as a unifier of insubstantial ‘voice’ and material ‘stone’ corresponds to the aesthetics of his documentary method, with its combination of insubstantial vision and care for the specific details preserved in historical records. Structurally, the Tempio is the central fact of the Malatesta Cantos. Its presence conditions the way in which the different poetic modes Pound employs in the sequence will be interpreted, and the reader’s valuation of the scraps of documentary material on offer is shaped by the relation of this ‘evidence’ to the Tempio. For, far from being the sole arbiter of the worth of such evidence, as would be the case if these poems offered a truly flat surface,

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Pound’s reader is often left with little choice but to dismiss the value of documentary fragments altogether. The limitations of the historical record are, in fact, one of the central themes of Canto 10, a poem that represents something of an interlude in the Malatesta Cantos in that it deals as much with Pope Pius II as it does with Sigismondo. The documents which Pound weaves into this canto generally present a negative image of Sigismondo that is very different from the one put forward elsewhere in the Malatesta Cantos. They are framed, however, in such a way as to leave little doubt as to how they should be received. The documents that report Sigismondo’s infamous character in Canto 10 are just as tangible as those used elsewhere in the section and, were they really allowed to collide with other historical records in an even-handed way, they would impossibly complicate Pound’s poem. These documents, however, are not to be trusted. The reader is explicitly told that they lack authority because they derive from unreliable sources: ‘rumour … / And other equally unimpeachable witnesses’ (C, 10/45). Whereas documents elsewhere in the Malatesta Cantos are given poetic resonance by their relation to the construction of the Tempio Malatestiano, the documents here are merely the bunkum That that monstrous swollen, swelling s. o. b. Papa Pio Secundo Æneas Silvius Piccolomini da Siena Had told him to spout, in their best bear’s-greased latinity; (C, 10/44)

Elsewhere in this same canto, Pound dramatically illustrates the falsity of the account such documents offer by comparing them to the effigy of Sigismondo that Pius had burned in Rome: A rare magnificent effigy costing 8 florins 48 bol (i.e. for the pair, as the first one wasn’t a good enough likeness). (C, 10/45)

Faced with the conflicting information put forward in the documentary mode, the reader must refer to the broader poetic framework of the sequence if she or he is to tell the real Sigismondo from the ‘rare magnificent’ likeness which documentary evidence, sponsored by Pius and upheld by the money and authority of the Church, has set in circulation to obscure the truth about him. The two can only be separated, Pound implies, by keeping in mind the construction of the Tempio Malatestiano: the central fact of the sequence against which the documentary fragments must be judged. The documentary poetics of the Malatesta Cantos are thus highly ambiguous. Scraps of historical records are thrust to their surface and vie for the reader’s attention, yet at the same time it is clear that such records occupy a subservient position within the formal repertoire of the sequence. This ambiguity reflects a more general ambivalence on Pound’s part concerning the nature of written records. They may, he realises, be just as easily used to obscure essential facts or to spread false information as to

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bring to light luminous details or act as a force that promotes cultural unity. As in the case of Pius II’s ‘rare magnificent effigy’ of Sigismondo, documentary evidence can be created ex nihilo by interested parties, gain credibility through the work of ‘rumor … and other unimpeachable witnesses’ and assume the status of established fact over time. Pound’s consciousness of these dangers made him consider historical documents with suspicion throughout his career. They can be useful, but only if one is certain as to whether the information they contain is ‘luminous’ or obscurantist; only if one possesses a framework within which they can be assigned a definite, rather than a relative value. As he explains in Guide to Kulchur, speaking of musical documents buried in Italian archives: No one who has spent less time than I have in these odd corners can have an adequate idea of the unmined treasure lying about more or less ordered in Italy … Naturally there is nothing duller than the results of such digging, UNLESS the searcher have some concept to work to. Not the document but the significance of the document. (GK, 220–1)

The document, in other words, is useful only to the extent that it gives a material form to a concept. In the same way, the documents thrust before the reader of the Malatesta Cantos are only useful insofar as they have significance in relation to the monument at the centre of the sequence.

Pound’s documentary poetics in Eleven New Cantos and the Fifth Decad of Cantos By the time he wrote the opening poems of Eleven New Cantos Pound’s documentary method had undergone significant changes. Employing the terminology used above, one might say that the space occupied by Pound’s documentary and narrative modes is more or less inverted in Eleven New Cantos. Narrative statements are used in the documentary cantos of this section only to guide the reader through what is predominately a sequence of source-based fragments. There are such comments as: And thus Mr Jefferson (president) to Tom Paine: (C, 31/153)

Or: Lord H. de Walden from Brussels. 1862 (C, 33/162)

However, the documentary transcription of source-based material now carries a far greater bulk of the poetic burden than it had in either the Malatesta or the Venetian Cantos. The intersection between subjective vision and the material record remains at the heart of these later documentary cantos. Yet Pound’s growing confidence in what he

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called the ideogrammic method of writing led him to contextualise the source-based material in his poetry far less rigidly than he had done in the past. His first major exposition of the premises of the ideogrammic method came in ABC of Reading, which was published in 1934, the same year as Eleven New Cantos. Here he proposed that knowledge was based on concrete observations, placed in relation to one another. Or, to use a scientific metaphor, the comparison a biologist makes between ‘a few hundred or thousand slides [to pick] out what is necessary for his general statement’ (ABCR, 22). Applied to Pound’s documentary poetics, this method involved ‘presenting first one facet and then another … to reveal the subject’ (GK, 51). In Eleven New Cantos and in the Fifth Decad of Cantos, documentary fragments are thus set before the reader one after the other and the interaction of different poetic modes that had characterised the Malatesta and Venetian Cantos becomes a much less important part of his writing. Narrative commentary is extremely limited in the major documentary poems of both instalments: the American history cantos (31–34 and 37) of Eleven New Cantos and the Siena Bank Cantos (42–43) of the Fifth Decad of Cantos. If the narrative mode occupies slightly more space in the latter poems, this is mainly due to the need to translate Italian documents into English, not because of any fundamental methodological changes in Pound’s approach. Indeed, as Ben Kimpel and T.C. Duncan Eaves have pointed out in their study of these poems, ‘almost every line of Cantos XLII and XLIII is suggested by a source’ (Kimpel and Duncan Eaves 1979, 518). It is also worth noting that Pound goes to new lengths in the Siena Bank Cantos to re-create the presence of the original documents visually in his poetry. The process of unearthing the documents is narrated to the reader, and brief explanations are given where necessary, but unlike the Malatesta Cantos, the documents relate the basic subject matter of the poetry and, increasingly, they dictate its shape as well:



July 1623 Loco Signi [a cross in the margin] That profit on deposits should be used to cover all losses and the distributions on the fifth year be made from remaining profits, after restoration of losses no (benché) matter how small with sane small reserve against future idem I, Livio Pasquini, notary, citizen of Siena, most faithfully copied July 18th. 1623 Consules, Iudices, and notary public pro serenissimo attest Livio’s superscript next date being November. (C, 42/210)

The central component of this passage is the document that lays out the just economic principles of the Monte dei Paschi bank. Still useful to contemporary society, these principles were formulated within a specific historical context. The fact of this localised application is stressed by the dates given in the passage (‘July 1623’ and ‘July 18th. 1623’), by the name of the notary and the mention of his

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faithful copying of the document which Pound has transcribed, and by the fact that his ‘superscript’ is underwritten by those in positions of authority within the city. Contrary to what had been the case in the Malatesta Cantos, the voice that operates outside the space delineated by this document is of decidedly secondary importance. It enters into the text both to explain that the cross in the margin of The Cantos is also present in the source document and to remind the reader that the poet/historian is also a translator who has chosen to render the Italian ‘benché’ (however) as ‘no matter how’. The cross that serves as the seal in the margin of Pound’s source is reproduced and inscribed into his poem so that the appearance of the page imitates that of the document. This procedure is repeated later in Canto 42 where the mountain that symbolises the Monte dei Paschi bank is transcribed into the text of Pound’s poem: foreseeing erection legitimate and just, such a MOUNTAIN



(C, 42/214)

Structurally, what is perhaps most important in this evolution is that instead of working between the documents, stitching them into the fabric of his poetry as it does even in the cursory introductions of the fragments used in Cantos 31–34, the narrative mode now operates within the space delineated by the documents. For the most part, it makes only those comments or adjustments deemed necessary to render the documents more easily comprehensible to the contemporary British or American reader. Even such minor intrusions as ‘Said Mr Jefferson’ and ‘T.J. to General Washington’ (C, 31/153), that were so common in Eleven New Cantos, are now generally eliminated. Those names and dates given within the documents are included; if none are present, none are supplied by a narrative voice. Pound’s application of the ideogrammic method to his documentary poetics thus increased his formal reliance upon juxtaposition, meaning that source-based material was now made to carry the bulk of the poetic burden. Consequently, the possibility of using complementary poetic modes to smooth the rough edges of the documents he presents was severely reduced. As the opening lines of Canto 31 (‘Tempus loquendi / Tempus tacendi’) imply, a poetic strategy that endeavours to make documentary fragments speak for themselves also entails an acceptance of the silence that intrudes between the rough edges of the fragments so presented. Pound had always been aware that an attention to historical documents also involved the recognition of the broader silence from which such documentation emerged. A poem like ‘Papyrus’ is effective precisely because it reminds the reader that the meaning of literary and historical texts is determined as much by what remains unknown as it is by what contemporary readers are actually in a position to consider. The torn letter reproduced in Canto 8 is effective for comparable reasons. By the same token, in Canto 13, Pound had celebrated Confucius’s recognition of the fragmentary nature of historical records,

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quoting his praise of ‘historians [who] left blanks in their writings,/ … for things they didn’t know’ (C, 13/60). The criticism that might be made of Pound’s application of the ideogrammic method to his documentary poetics in the 1930s is that it tends to minimise the significance of such historical ‘blanks’. There is a contradiction in his approach between his isolation of fragmentary documentary evidence from the larger contexts from which it is extracted and his insistence on the need to gain a full understanding of the historical complex towards which the evidence gestures. This is the basic paradox of Pound’s later documentary poetics. He adopts a formal strategy that thrusts the incompleteness of the material evidence with which he works to the forefront of his poetry, deliberately exposing the rough edges of the documents which he exhibits. Yet he suggests at the same time that these documents may serve to reveal ‘the whole subject from a new angle’ (GK, 51); or, more provocatively, to take ‘a totalitarian hold on our history’ (GK, 32). Over the course of the 1930s, Pound increasingly suppressed what have been described in the foregoing discussion as the narrative and lyrical modes from his documentary poetics. Yet the assumptions these modes involved nevertheless remained crucial to the later documentary cantos. The narrative mode, for example, which had been used in the Malatesta and Venetian Cantos to contextualise documents within non-source-based catalogues of historical events, continues to exert a silent pressure beneath the surface of later documentary cantos. It subsists as the conceptual framework that provides the criteria by which Pound selects a given set of documentary fragments over another. Likewise, the lyrical mode, which in earlier cantos had involved brief but central celebrations of a timeless concept, as it intersected with a given material form, is now figured more abstractly as a vision of the ‘whole subject’ which the documents work to engender in the reader’s mind.

Pound’s documentary poetics in Cantos LII–LXXI In later cantos, the documentary method is no less dependent upon the subjective vision that imparts significance to material evidence than it had been at previous stages in the poem’s development. Pound’s later documentary poetics, however, is characterised by a far less critical acceptance of the role such vision plays in pulling incomplete and often contradictory material from the historical record into a meaningful form. In order to bridge the gap between the fragmented documentary surface of his source-based poetry and the synthetic vision towards which his poetry strives, Pound depends increasingly upon two basic assumptions: (1) that language is grounded in natural process and therefore can attain the same accuracy and permanence as scientific definitions if it is used with precision; (2) that the field of material documents upon which the understanding of history depends is not impossibly vast, hopelessly contradictory or insufficiently complete, but rather comes to the present observer in a more or less manageable form through the intervention of editors and anthologists.

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The association Pound creates between language and natural process is of crucial importance to the Adams Cantos and will be discussed at length in Chapter 5 of this study. It is worth noting in passing, however, that the introduction of the Li Ki (the Chinese Book of Rites) on the second page of Canto 52 begins the source-based consideration of history that will characterise Cantos LII–LXXI by establishing a link between the natural foundation that underlies this history and the written texts which record it. The Li Ki is presented as something that can be ‘known’, implying that its language is intimately linked to the constancy and clarity of the natural forces it catalogues: Know then: Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades Sovran is Lord of the Fire to this month are birds. (C, 52/258)

The source-based poetics that dominate Cantos LII–LXXI are thus introduced with the injunction to ‘know then’, implying that written texts can be known unambiguously. As such, they are valuable tools to be used against the obscurantism which Pound associates with usury and posits as a threat to a proper understanding of history. If written texts are to be given such solidity, however, they must first be isolated from the impossibly vast body of surrounding writings out of which they emerge. Recognising this, Pound increasingly celebrated the work of editors and anthologists who had reduced the documentary record to its most essential elements. While in earlier documentary cantos he had been anxious to dramatise a return to archival sources, by the time he came to write Cantos LII–LXXI he was content to accept the shape of the written record he had inherited, recognising the intermediary work of those editors and anthologists who had brought it into a manageable form. This evolution represents a fundamental shift in his attitude towards documentary materials. Catherine Paul has summarised the situation evocatively by noting a change in the imagery Pound used to describe the British Museum Library: The Ezra Pound of ‘How I Began’ used an image of the Reading Room to underscore a literary mission valuing the learning and creation that could happen in the archive, and the Ezra Pound of Guide to Kulchur uses an image of the same room to alter that mission, promoting instead the view of culture as beginning ‘when one HAS “forgotten-what-book” [GK, 134]. … Archival culture in this [later] image is largely inaccessible, either too unwieldy to make sense of or altogether illusory, and those aspects of culture that are accessible, that are ideally ‘portable’ in the sense that they have already been incorporated into one’s understanding, are the most relevant and useful. (Paul 2002, 132–3)

Pound’s own efforts to define a canon of essential literature in ‘How to Read’ (1929), ABC of Reading (1934) and, in a broader way, in Guide to Kulchur (1938) reflect this changing attitude towards ‘archival culture’. He likewise celebrated the importance of editors and anthologists in much of his writing of these years, beginning with Confucius himself:

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And Kung cut 3000 odes to 300 Comet from Yng star to Sin star, that is two degrees long in the 40th year of King Ouang Died Kung aged 73 b.c. 479 (C, 53/273)

Such activity was also associated with the Emperors who possessed the vision and sensibility necessary to achieve a synthetic account of Chinese history and culture. Thus YANG LO commanded a ‘summa’ that is that the gist of the books be corrected. (C, 57/311)

A similar function was also, of course, exercised by Charles Francis Adams, the editor of the Works of John Adams and one of the invisible heroes of The Cantos. Such figures are hugely important to Pound since it is through their efforts that the documents which comprise the historical and literary record are passed on to future generations in a manageable form, reduced to their essential elements, and made available through publication. Pound’s most complete statement on the subject comes at the end of section one of ABC of Reading, where he praises those who have worked to condense written records into a manageable form. He notes that The Bible is a compendium, people trimmed it to make it solid. It has gone on for ages, because it wasn’t allowed to overrun all the available parchment; a Japanese emperor whose name I have forgotten and whose name you needn’t remember, found that there were TOO MANY NOH PLAYS, he picked out 450 and the Noh stage LASTED from 1400 or whenever right down till the day the American navy intruded, and that didn’t stop it… . Ovid’s Metamorphoses are a compendium, not an epic like Homer’s; Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are a compendium of all the good yarns Chaucer knew. The Tales have lasted through centuries while the longwinded mediaeval narratives went into museums. (ABCR, 92)

Part of the reason why Pound was so keen to celebrate the work of editors and compilers of textual material was simply a practical recognition of the need to accept the present state of the written record. As he wrote to Fernando Mezzasoma in 1944, ‘so as not to lose years we are going forward, not beginning anew each time but using studies already in existence and the best translations in French, English, and Latin’ (Redman 1991, 251). Pound’s admiration for the role of editors, however, also springs from a more questionable belief in the capacity of intelligent individuals to pull the historical record into a coherent shape that captures its most essential features. Over the course of the 1930s he was increasingly willing to describe editorial activity in terms of a struggle to master a range of documentary material through strength of will. In one of the letters he wrote to Olga Rudge just before his 1931 trip to Paris, for example, he spoke of his efforts to ‘condencentrate’ documents relating to early American history as a task that required him to ‘fix his VOLITION’ (ORP, Beinecke, 10, 256). More disturbingly, he would apply a similar formula to the political activity of Benito Mussolini in Jefferson and/or Mussolini, writing of the hand or eye or ear of the Duce, the Debunker par excellence … the deputies

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and ministers know that there is an EDITORIAL eye and ear – precisely – an editor, who will see through their bunkum. (J/M, 74)

In both cases, the will of the active individual is directed at the editorial condensing of a given body of material, so as to remove the essential gist of a subject from a body of extraneous matter. The belief in such editorial intelligence stands behind Pound’s confidence that a series of juxtaposed, source-based fragments can serve as the basis for understanding an entire historical complex. In being expected to accept them as such, the reader is tacitly asked to accept the decisions of those editors who made this material available to Pound in a manageable form, as well as Pound’s own presentational choices. The interplay of subjective vision and material evidence that had been displayed openly in the Malatesta and Venetian Cantos through the interaction of different poetic modes may thus be said to operate beneath the surface of the text in Cantos LII–LXXI. Likewise, the blanks in the historical record that had, in earlier documentary cantos, been displayed as limitations to knowledge are now increasingly elided. Such developments help explain Pound’s decision to base the Chinese History Cantos and John Adams Cantos on a single source and to employ documentary poetics to the almost total exclusion of other modes. Pound positions himself at the end of a line of editors who have shaped a diverse range of material into a coherent form. He accepts this state of affairs as satisfactory – the most efficient basis for gaining knowledge of the period in question – and applies his own ‘editorial’ intelligence to the material he finds, making selections from it according to the logic of the ideogrammic method. *** The manner in which Pound made these selections from his sources for the Chinese History Cantos and Adams Cantos was slightly, but significantly, different. In the Chinese History Cantos he considered his source, Joseph de Mailla’s eleven-volume Histoire Générale de la Chine, as being essentially a catalogue of historical events. The manuscript notes which Pound took as he read through de Mailla show him focusing on a chronological progress through the reigns of successive Emperors, noting how Confucian ethics may be used as the basis for just government and economic righteousness in different eras.12 Broadly speaking, the source-text in these cantos gestures outward towards a space – Chinese history – that has a concrete historical reality. Pound takes it to be his task to summarise especially pertinent events, and in so doing he pays relatively little attention to the manner in which these events are presented by de Mailla. The events of Chinese history are the subject matter of these poems, not the language of de Mailla. Working from a French text to write an English poem, Pound transcribed very few lines directly into the Chinese History notebooks. It is even rather rare to find direct English translations of phrases from the French original. Instead, Pound jotted down general statements that record what he considered to be the most pertinent facts contained in his source. He followed de Mailla’s content in a schematic way, but paid little attention to his language. The Chinese History notebooks are filled with such general comments as:

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735 B.C.// Tsin rising magistrate — Tartar loser decline of Emp[eror]. rise " princes. (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4900)

Or such lists of dates and events as: Tchao-Tsong 888 squabbles of governors + too many eunuchs prisoner of eunuchs Sun-te-Tchao 901 eunuchs out 903 slaughter of eunuchs murdered @ 38, 16 of reign 904 8 sons slaughtered by Tchu-ouen 907 Dynasty XIV (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4900)

When the poetry of the Chinese History Cantos is compared to the passages in the source from which it was derived, Pound’s attitude becomes even clearer. De Mailla’s Histoire is always clearly identifiable as Pound’s source of information about the events he presents, but Pound’s language is constantly straining to break away from that of his source. He eliminates numerous inessential details in the interest of concision, while de Mailla is verbose in his descriptions. He incorporates slang and colloquialisms to approximate informal spoken language, while de Mailla maintains a formal diction throughout. He is often brash (even violently so), while de Mailla is subdued. The Emperor T’ai Tsung’s decision to reduce the number of women in attendance at his palace, for instance, is described in the Histoire Générale de la Chine in the following terms: Ce prince commença son règne par congédier trois mille femmes du palais, qu’il renvoya chez leurs parens. (HGC, VI, 40)13

Pound brashly summarises this decision by noting that ‘[w]hen TAÏ TSONG came to be emperor he turned out 3000/fancies’ (C, 54/285). By the same token, in Canto 59 he offers a colloquial summary of the Emperor Yong-tching’s efforts to stimulate the production of the labouring class: An’ woikinmen thought of. If proper in field work get 8th degree button and right to sit at tea with the governor. (C, 61/335)

In de Mailla, this reform is described in much broader and more detailed terms, whose language is only very loosely reminiscent of that of The Cantos:

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Les laboureurs, dont la profession est la plus nécessaire à l’Etat, puisque les autres classes lui doivent leur subsistance, fixèrent de tout temps l’attention du gouvernement, qui n’a pas discontinué de leur accorder une protection particulière pour les encourager dans leurs travaux. YONG-TCHING… règla que ce sage et actif laboureur seroit élevé au degré de mandarin du huitième ordre, et recevroit de la cour des patentes de mandarin honoraire, avec les prérogatives de porter l’habit de mandarin, de visiter le gouverneur de la ville, de s’asseoir en sa présence et de prendre du thé avec lui. (HGC, XI, 425-6)14

More generally, it should be noted that Pound relies on chronology to provide the framework for the poetry of the Chinese History Cantos, in a way he explicitly refuses to do in the Adams Cantos. In the Chinese History notebooks, page numbers are frequently noted along with dates so as to facilitate reference back to the source. In the final version of these cantos, however, a substantial portion of the dates which Pound had transcribed are retained, while material that would serve to explicitly foreground the source is almost entirely eliminated. At one point in his manuscript, for example, he notes: Kouang-ou-Ti Dies 57 AD good emp[eror]. p. 347 (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4900)

In the final text of Canto 54 he elaborates slightly on what it was that made Kouangou-Ti a good Emperor and eliminates the page reference, stitching information about Kouang Ou into a chronological narrative, which is only loosely based on the phrasing of de Mailla’s Histoire, and whose coherence is ensured by the presence of dates that remind the reader of chronological sequence and by the capitalised names which serve as reminders of imperial rule: KOUANG OU took his risks as a common soldier HAN MING changed nothing of OU’s gave no posts to princesses’ relatives and Yang Tchong sent in a placet that food prices had risen since the start of the Tartar war, taxes had risen Year of drought 77 and the Empress MA CHI answered: Until now few Empresses’ relatives have been enriched without making trouble When Ouang Chi’s five brothers were lifted thick fog came on this Empire ‘History is a school book for princes.’ HAN HO TI heard men’s good counsel a.d. 107 And in the third moon of the first year of HAN NGAN the Empress’ brother named Teng-tchi refused the honour of princedom But gathered scholars and finally heard of Yang-tchin whom he made governor. (C, 54/280)

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By contrast, Pound thrust the language of his source into the foreground of the Adams Cantos, forcing his readers to question how knowledge of the past is transmitted via the written record, rather than gesturing towards an independent historical space. If ‘history is a school book for princes’, as Pound claims in the lines quoted above, the Adams Cantos offer a graphic illustration of how this book must be read. In his manuscript of the Adams Cantos, Pound concentrated almost entirely on transcribing textual fragments directly from his source, rather than making more general notes about the events they describe. The Works thus provided the raw material from which the Adams Cantos would be constructed, rather than a set of guidelines for presenting a given set of historical events, as de Mailla’s Histoire had done. Dates are much less carefully recorded in the Adams Cantos manuscript than they had been in that of the Chinese History Cantos, while page numbers are recorded almost systematically.15 Such careful recording of page numbers, of course, served the simply practical purpose of facilitating reference back to the source when Pound prepared the rough typescript of the sequence. More generally, however, the Adams Cantos poetry notebooks record a significant shift in Pound’s attitude towards his source, whereby what is now essential is not so much where events occurred in history, but rather how they are recorded in the Works of John Adams. The textual fragments he transcribed as he made his way through the Works are not meaningful primarily for their ability to gesture toward historical events. They cannot, therefore, be paraphrased and laid out in chronological order as had been the case with the notes he took from de Mailla’s Histoire. Instead, the language of these fragments – their textual materiality – becomes the primary scene of the struggle to understand history. The following excerpt from Pound’s notebook draft of Canto 62 might be cited as an example of this attitude: allegiance is to King’s natural person the Spencers said Coke hatched treason denied this 128 ------------------- allegiance follows and not politic person ----are we mere slaves of another people? 130 -----mercantile temper of Britain ----be glad of constitution ---- without appeal to higher powers

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138 (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4903, p. 19)

What is documented in these lines, as the phrase ‘without appeal to higher powers unwritten’ implies, are significant fragments from the source itself; the material text in which John Adams’s concept of government and society is given form. By this stage of Pound’s career, the narrative mode that had been so important in the documentary cantos of the 1920s has been so thoroughly folded into the textual fragments culled from Charles Francis Adams’s edition of the Works that it has all but resigned its power to intervene in the poetry. In the final version of the Adams Cantos it is almost entirely absent, and in the poetry notebook it may be seen preparing for its own disappearance. It subsists here in the form of those lines Pound drew to mark divisions between the fragments he transcribed; silent reminders of his editorial activity and of the disappearance of material he had chosen to leave out of The Cantos. As an example of how Pound’s documentary poetics exploits the possibilities inherent in the Works, this discussion may be concluded with a consideration of how a sixteen-line passage of the Adams Cantos evolved from Pound’s notebook draft to its published form. The passage in question is from Canto 62 and deals with Adams’s activities in Congress during the Revolutionary War and with his departure to serve as an American envoy to France. It is fairly typical of Pound’s practice in the section as a whole, though it is worth noting that there are more non-source-based interjections in Canto 62 (based on Charles Francis Adams’s biography of his grandfather) than in the other Adams Cantos. The passage reads as follows: TO serve liberty at a higher rate than tyrants wd/pay ’em you shd/have numbered yr/regiments, you never send me accounts e.g. of guns, numbers, their weight of metal I never know what size (frigates etc/) Impassible moderation of Washington saved us by stoppin’ catfights between officers For proportional representation— Clearest head in the Congress (John’s was) THUMON we want one man of integrity in that embassy Bordeaux, and passed on to Paris the ethics, so called, of Franklin IF moral analysis be not the purpose of historical writing… (C, 62/345–6)

In these lines, only the interjection of the Greek word ‘THUMON’ and the colloquial reference to ‘catfights between officers’ introduce language that diverges significantly from that of the source. Other minor adjustments to the language of the Works are

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made for the sake of clarification or concision, without altering the tone of the source: the parenthetical mention ‘John’s was’, for example, or the reference to Franklin’s ‘so called’ ethics, by which Pound condenses a far lengthier qualification of Franklin’s moral character in his source. Besides these, the adjustments to the language of the source are very local, and are generally made for the sake of the sound and rhythm of his poetry. The sentence from the source on which the first line of the passage quoted above is based, for example, deals with Silas Deane’s enlistment of European soldiers of fortune. It reads: ‘Adventurers of all sorts crowded around him, ready to offer their valuable services to the great cause of liberty at a much higher price than they could get by remaining to serve despotism at home’ (WJA, I, 249). Pound condenses this sentence, alters ‘price’ to ‘rate’, so as to create assonance with ‘pay’ at the end of the line, and makes ‘tyrants’ the subject of the second part of the line, rather than speaking of despotism in a general way. All such changes are of great importance to the rhythm and sound structure of the line of poetry which Pound produces from his source. They are not, however, the product of paraphrase that distances the reader from the language of the source, so much as part of an effort to adapt the language of this source to the exigencies of his poem. When such adaptation is deemed unnecessary, textual fragments are imported wholesale from the Works into the Adams Cantos, as is the case in the passage quoted above with the lines ‘Impassible moderation of Washington’, ‘Clearest head in the Congress’ or ‘be not the purpose of historical writing’.

Figures 2.1 and 2.2  Sample pages from Ezra Pound’s notebook draft of Canto 62 (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4904). Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

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Turning from the published version of this passage to Pound’s manuscript of the lines (reproduced in Figures 2.1 and 2.2), it is interesting to observe the care with which he noted the divisions between the fragments he transcribed from the Works, as well as page references and even, on some occasions, the speaker of a given idea. In the notebook draft of this passage, for example, the comments on Benjamin Franklin’s ethics are clearly attributed to Charles Francis Adams. It was only when he set about preparing the rough typescript of the sequence that Pound wove the textual fragments he had selected from the Works together in ways that often blurred the distinctions between material drawn from different contexts. In his first typescript of Canto 62 almost all of the page references disappear, for example, as does the identification of Charles Francis Adams as the source of the comments on Franklin. Preliminary decisions about line breaks and indentation are made, some of which fuse together material from distinct contexts in the source. Where necessary, commentary is added to flesh out an idea not adequately developed in the initial notebook draft (as in the lines about the Congress lacking adequate information about military personnel and equipment in the pasage under consideration). Pound’s rough typescript draft of the passage is reproduced in Figure 2.3.

Figure 2.3  Sample page from the rough typescript of Canto 62 (EPP, Beinecke, 75, 3360). Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

When he produced his clean typescript, Pound eliminated all page references, adjusted the line breaks and provided careful instructions regarding typography and indentations. The latter decisions were made with an eye to increasing the clarity of the passage. The parenthetical comment that Adams possesses the clearest head in the Congress was inserted at this stage for the same reason, as were the ellipses following the comment about moral analysis being the purpose of historical writing. Pound’s clean typescript draft of this passage is reproduced in Figure 2.4.

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Figure 2.4  Sample page from the clean typescript draft of Canto 62 (EPP, Beinecke, 75, 3361, p. 6). Reproduced courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

The progress from the notebook draft to the published text of this passage thus records an effort to work within the textual space delineated by the Works of John Adams, adjusting the language of this source where necessary for poetic effect. Non-documentary poetic modes play almost no part in the poem and the sourcebased fragments that serve as Pound’s poetic raw material are not positioned in relation to an extra-textual monument as they had been in the Malatesta or Venetian Cantos. Rather, following the lead of the title of Pound’s 1938 essay on the Jefferson– Adams correspondence, the Works of John Adams are themselves considered as a monument that possesses major historical significance, and of which readers will gain a basic understanding as individual facets of it are presented following the terms of Pound’s ideogrammic method.

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3

Reading the Adams Cantos While generations of readers have been prepared to recognise the Adams Cantos’ thematic centrality to Pound’s long poem, and to acknowledge that they represent something new in the formal repertoire of The Cantos, few have found the section to provide a satisfying reading experience. Its main subject is the struggle to achieve good government. Pound’s Adams, in his public actions and his private character, is meant to demonstrate how Confucian ethics might be applied to the American scene. Peter Liebregts summarises the subject matter of the section with admirable clarity and concision: The main thread of the Adams Cantos is John Adams’s integrity in his search to create possibilities for the advancement of human happiness in an ordered society. This is exemplified in the cantos in Pound’s selection of Adams’s practice as a lawyer, in his many plans for social and economical reforms, and in his reading of moral and political treatises in order to find models for the new nation… . The Adams Cantos give us Pound’s picture of the ideal statesman, that is, a Confucian sage in action and one whose directio voluntatis for the welfare of his people is based on the exercising of the four Platonist virtues: justice, wisdom, courage, and temperance. (Liebregts 2004, 243)

Once these features of the Adams Cantos have been recognised, however, questions remain as to the effectiveness of Pound’s poetry. How clearly does his poetic presentation of John Adams transmit basic information about his life and times to the reader, and thereby allow him or her to grasp the main thematic strands of these ten cantos? Even once the reader has come to terms with the information transmitted and the themes developed in these cantos, how poetically satisfying is she or he likely to find them? Is their scope not impossibly exaggerated in proportion to their importance within the broader scheme of The Cantos? For a group of cantos that deals with the transmission of historical knowledge, how meaningfully do they dramatise the process by which history is understood? Some of the negative responses that have been given to these questions over the years are summarised in the Introduction to this book. Many such responses, however, are informed by reading strategies that misrepresent Pound’s project in the Adams Cantos in fundamental ways. The most enduring of these are based on the notion that Pound’s principal interest in the section was biographical, and that he hoped to offer as complete a portrait as possible of the American statesman he had come to admire most by the late 1930s; or that he wrote the Adams Cantos with the aim of disseminating John Adams’s work, in the interest of political propaganda; or that the Adams

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Cantos were meant essentially as marginalia to John Adams’s Works, needing to be read in parallel with this source if they are to be fully appreciated. Since such approaches have achieved a fair degree of currency, this chapter begins by briefly examining their limits, before moving on to consider Pound’s poetic ambitions for the Adams Cantos and to suggest how his accomplishment in the section might be more fully appreciated.

Common approaches to the Adams Cantos Since a single protagonist occupies the foreground of Pound’s poetry for the unprecedented space of ten cantos, it is hardly surprising that many readers have judged the Adams Cantos on their success in offering a credible portrait of John Adams. The assumption that the section should be read in this way underlies Hugh Kenner’s claim that the ‘special plane of attention’ of Cantos LII–LXXI is ‘history and biography’ (Kenner 1971, 532), while Humphrey Carpenter implicitly adopts a similar attitude when he dismisses the section by claiming that ‘[Pound] made complete nonsense of Adams’s life’ (Carpenter 1988, 573). Leon Surette similarly criticises Pound’s method in these cantos by noting that it obscures ‘the career or life of John Adams’ (Surette 1979, 166). Nor are such reading strategies in any way restricted to unsympathetic accounts of the Adams Cantos. Carroll F. Terrell, for example, celebrates the section in an article entitled ‘John Adams Speaking: Some Reflections on Technique’ by claiming that Pound’s methodology allows him to put ‘[t]he man himself … on record: here we have John Adams speaking and acting; we do not have someone else’s opinions about his speaking and acting’ (Terrell 1975, 533). Thus, Terrell insists, the quality of Pound’s poetry can be judged by gauging the truth of the portrait it offers of John Adams: The stunning result [of Pound’s work] is the image of an Adams dramatically different from the image previously made by analytical historians. And there is no doubt about the truth of the new image: word by word and line by line this is what Adams said, wrote and thought … Pound is dedicated to the truth about men and history. (Terrell 1975, 534)

The most obvious problem with such readings is that by emphasising Adams’s biography, they reduce their attention to Pound’s source-based poetics, focusing on the presentation of Adams’s life at the expense of an engagement with Pound’s documentary method and thus seriously oversimplifying his poetic project. Indeed, when one stops to consider individual lines of the Adams Cantos in detail, one is struck by the fact that Pound frequently engages with his source in a manner that deliberately obscures his protagonist’s biography. It is inaccurate, for example, to say that these cantos record ‘what Adams said, wrote and thought’, since Adams himself is far from being at the origin of all the lines Pound incorporates into the sequence. To cite only one obvious example of this, all the lines culled from volume one of the Works of John Adams (the whole of Canto 62 and the opening of Canto 63) are not

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based on Adams’s own writing, but on the biography begun by his son John Quincy Adams and completed by his grandson Charles Francis Adams. Pound’s reader is introduced to the section’s protagonist, in other words, not through an arrangement of John Adams’s own words, but rather through arrangements of words written by a third party. Pound is quite well aware of this characteristic of his source, even advertising it in a number of passages, as when he draws ‘Chawles Fwancis [Adams]’ into a description of his grandfather’s defence of Preston and the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre (C, 62/342).1 His name likewise appears two pages later, when Pound uses it to stress that the economic principles he espouses are not simply carried into The Cantos through an unmediated presentation of John Adams’s thought, but depend also upon his grandson’s editorial work: Local legislation / that is basic / we wd. consent in matters of empire trade, It is by no means essential to trade with foreign nations at all as sez Chas Francis, China and Japan have proved it. (C, 62/344)

Indeed, as Pound selected textual fragments from the Works for inclusion in his poem, there is every evidence that he made no qualitative distinction between material written by Adams himself and that drawn from other sources.2 Nor is this sort of attitude revealed only in those cantos based upon the biography that constitutes the first volume of the Works. Later, when John Adams’s own writings do, in fact, constitute his source, Pound’s citations continue to draw heavily upon material that originates in the voices, writing or thought of subjects other than his primary protagonist. The reader is, for example, presented with fragments of Adams’s reading notes, phrases spoken by his interlocutors in conversation, excerpts from letters he received, snatches of published articles by a range of contemporaries, material drawn from Charles Francis Adams’s critical apparatus and Pound’s own interjections. The rapid juxtapositions of such a wide range of material – all of which is only very rarely associated with a specific source – make it all but impossible to determine at exactly what point John Adams’s voice leaves off and others begin. Pound’s attentiveness to the multiple textual layers of his source cannot be simply ignored in order to focus on Adams’s biography. In Canto 67, for example, he mischievously forces the reader to pose questions about his protagonist’s identity by drawing attention to Adams’s use of the pseudonym ‘Novanglus’ – creating a tension between Adams’s false signature and the signature’s traditional role of representing an author’s desire to stand behind his work:3 Shirley a skunk, Pownall a gentleman honest, Bernard skilled enough in the law to do mischief and thus the total government was to be rendered wholly independent of the people and the cream to go into their salaries (governor’s, lieutenant’s and judges’) (signed) Novanglus (C, 67/388)

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Elsewhere in the same canto, his treatment of the Novanglus papers becomes so complex that it is all but impossible to summarise strictly in terms of biographical presentation: In the Boston Gazette 17th April Hostilities at Lexington commenced on the 19th of April several other papers were written and sent to the printer and probably lost amid that confusion (note to the 1819 edition of NOVANGLUS) PLAN OF GOVERNMENT (C, 67/390–1)

In the space of these six lines Pound describes Adams’s Novanglus papers by explicitly or implicitly referring to: (1) the site of their original publication; (2) the historical context in which they were written; (3) the fact of their collection in an edition which was published in 1819; (4) the critical apparatus that was attached to them upon their inclusion in the Works (the source of the line ‘Hostilities at Lexington commenced on the 19th of April’ being an annotation by Charles Francis Adams); (5) their context within the larger text of the Works (‘PLAN OF GOVERNMENT’ being the title Charles Francis Adams gave to another section of the Works, marking an editorial division between the Novanglus papers and another part of his grandfather’s output); and (6) the material transmission of these papers and the accidents attendant upon it. Far from seeking to downplay such textual history in an effort to reduce the surface noise of his poem and make possible a clearer presentation of John Adams’s life, Pound goes out of his way in passages like this to make it an integral part of the canto.4 The methodological assumptions of Pound’s documentary poetics were largely responsible for such careful attention to questions of intertextuality and textual history. In its form of the late 1930s, the documentary method imposed an attention to the materiality of the written text and to questions of textual production and reception. Pound’s engagement with such issues has led some readers to approach his later source-based poetry using terms inspired by post-structuralist theory.5 More broadly, however, one might notice that the major themes Pound explores in the Adams Cantos – the struggle to achieve good government, for example, or the use of language as a means of shaping a responsible vision of public affairs – necessarily involve something more than the exposition of a single protagonist’s biography. One of the things Pound found most valuable in Adams was the way in which his attention to language created points of intersection between the public and private spheres. Indeed, his very idea of an ‘Adams paideuma’ stresses that what is important in these cantos is not so much the isolated fact of Adams’s life as the manner in which that life and thought were ‘inrooted’ in broader historical and ideological currents of early American history.6 Reading strategies which unduly exaggerate the importance of biography in the Adams Cantos thus make it difficult to appreciate fully the complexity of Pound’s poetic project. ***

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Even more restrictive are readings based on the idea that Pound’s main goal in the Adams Cantos was simply to disseminate a body of writing that was generally unavailable in the late 1930s. Such an approach foregrounds what was at best a peripheral motivation for Pound’s composition of these poems, at the expense of a more substantial engagement with the text. ‘Why Adams?’ Humphrey Carpenter asks. His response is simple: The chief motive for the John Adams Cantos was simply [Pound’s] belief that Adams’s writings were not available in print in the 1930s and needed to be disseminated. (Carpenter 1988, 572)

While Carpenter’s is by far the bluntest statement of such an argument, numerous other studies have made similar gestures. Donald Davie, for example, as part of what is generally a far more balanced assessment of Pound’s poetry, speculates that undoubtedly part of [Pound’s] intention in writing these cantos was to find readers for an author who, on literary no less than historical grounds, deserves to be read closely and often. (Davie 1965, 161)

It is true, of course, that Pound campaigned tirelessly throughout the 1930s for the dissemination of Adams’s writing in a cheap edition. In a letter of 14 February 1938 to Henry Canby, Secretary of the National Institute for Arts and Letters, for example, he wrote that [a] job, and I think the first job for a serious Institute is the publication in convenient form of the thought of John Adams, Jefferson and Van Buren. That kind of thing is particularly the sort of thing an Institute could and should do. (Stock 1970, 352)

A letter which Pound wrote to Hubert Creekmore roughly a year later, while he was at work on the Adams Cantos, reveals his continued preoccupation with the need to disseminate Adams’s writing. He excoriates a system of publication whereby you can buy Lenin, Trotsky (the messiest mutt of the lot), Stalin for 10 cents and 25 cents, and it takes seven years to get a set of John Adams at about 30 dollars. (SL, 322)

Such statements should not, however, be taken as explanations of his motivation for writing the Adams Cantos. There are, one must remember, numerous cases where Pound promoted cheap prose editions of authors whom he admired while also composing cantos based on their work. His letter to Canby, for example, shows him campaigning for cheap editions of Thomas Jefferson’s and Martin Van Buren’s work even though he had already composed cantos based upon their writing in the early 1930s. Later in his career, he would similarly both campaign for the reissue of Alexander Del Mar’s History of Monetary Systems as part of his ‘square-dollar series’ and write a canto based on that text. Such examples make it clear that Pound did

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not consider the writing of source-based poetry to be a substitute for disseminating material from that source in something close to its original form. An examination of Pound’s correspondence of the late 1930s and early 1940s makes it very clear that he considered the reissuing of Adams’s work in a cheap edition to be a separate project from the Adams Cantos. Thus, his campaign for the dissemination of Adams’s writings continued after he had completed his work on the section. On 2 September 1939, after the Adams Cantos were already in proof, he told Douglas McPherson that [w]hat is needed is 60 or 80 pages of selections of gists of the writings of Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, Jackson, Johnson. Plus such data as Overholser gives. You can’t run volumes of the founders’ series in a small mag, but you can demand ’em, and damn the lights out of the sons of bitches who aren’t getting ‘em into print, i.e., all these Hist[ory] profs. (SL, 325)

The implication, since Pound does not mention his forthcoming instalment of Cantos as part of a solution to the unavailability of such writing, is that the Adams Cantos are something other than ‘selections of gists of the writings of Adams’ with special emphasis on economic data. An unpublished letter which he wrote to Vaughn Brokow of the Equitist League on 18 March 1942 – two years after the Adams Cantos were published – reinforces this idea. Pound is still complaining here that The most VILE and stinking lack in American school (or other) books is lack of ANY sort of compendia of the thought of the american founders, Adams, Jefferson, Van Buren, Taylor of Caroline; etc. In the school courses 6 out of 8 key events from 1750 to the final betrayal in 1862 are OMITTED. (EPP, Beinecke, 6, 254)

On the whole, the impression with which one is left after a comprehensive survey of Pound’s correspondence on the subject is that he was quite eager to have someone else take on the project of disseminating Adams’s writing, feeling that he did not have the time, resources, or capacity to adequately carry out the task himself. An unpublished letter to Montgomery Butchart, written on 14 February 1938, makes these points concisely: Busy as hell… . A third book for YOU wd/ be the GIST of John Adams. You can reach the Brit. Museum. I can’t. [A]lso you wd/ do a thorough job of kind that can get printed. I wd. take what I wanted and then stop. (EPP, Beinecke, 7, 307)

The dissemination of the ‘GIST’ of John Adams’s writings, in other words, would require exactly the thoroughness and familiarity with a broad range of pertinent materials that Pound’s critics have so often accused the Adams Cantos of lacking. His willingness to recognise the importance of these qualities for making an effective selection of Adams’s writing, only months before he began work on the section, should make one seriously question the wisdom of reading his poems too strictly in terms of such a paradigm.

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*** A third commonly employed strategy for reading the Adams Cantos is to refer passages of Pound’s poem back to their original contexts in the Works, assuming that Pound’s writing depends upon this source both for its ability to make meaningful historical statements and for its effectiveness as poetry. This argument that the Adams Cantos must be read alongside the Works of John Adams if they are to be fully understood has been made by both hostile and enthusiastic readers of the section. Clark Emery, for example, criticises the Adams Cantos because they require ‘too much shifting between the poem and Pound’s source to become as meaningful as one would like’ (Emery 1958, 177). Leon Surette describes the failures of the Adams Cantos in similar terms. They do not, he claims, ‘yield anything to literary analysis [and they] can [be appreciated] … only by working through [them] with the Life and Works’ (Surette 1979, 161). Massimo Bacigalupo expresses his frustration with the Adams Cantos by describing them as ‘a bewildering hodgepodge which we can only set right by checking Adams’ volumes’ (Bacigalupo 1980, 99). Another critical tradition has embraced the Adams Cantos’s supposed reliance on their source, seeing it as a means by which Pound ensured the authenticity of his historical account, and celebrating the manner in which cross-referencing between the cantos and their source brings to light meanings that might otherwise have remained obscure. Frederick Sanders, for example, notes the way in which ‘a familiarity with Pound’s sources completes for the reader meanings that would otherwise be relatively inaccessible to him in the reading of the Poundian lines on the page’ (Sanders 1975, 22–3). In order to encourage such familiarity, Sanders compiled a book-length reference work that situates nearly every line of the Adams Cantos within its original context in the Works. This reference remains an invaluable tool for scholars who wish to attain a greater understanding of the way in which Pound went about composing the Adams Cantos. Yet the value of reading the Adams Cantos as what Donald Davie has called ‘a poem made up of marginalia upon a source’ (Davie 1965, 206) is highly debatable. In so doing, critics like Sanders leave themselves ill-equipped to either appreciate the poetic possibilities of Pound’s method or to adequately describe the limitations of the historical account offered by the Adams Cantos. A far more productive way of describing the section’s methodological assumptions is proposed by Peter Nicholls, who speaks of it as being a ‘substitute for the original’ rather than ‘marginalia’ upon it: Pound’s way of making his text a kind of substitute for the original entails the production of a deliberately unspecific syntax which absorbs different elements into an autonomous and continuous discourse of its own. (Nicholls 1984, 134)

Such an attitude offers creative possibilities which Pound exploits throughout the Adams Cantos. Most obviously, it allows him to juxtapose elements that had not been associated with one another in the Works, creating a range of potential meanings as he pries material free from its original context and includes it in the ‘autonomous and continuous discourse’ of which Nicholls speaks.

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Pound’s attitude towards his source is thus highly ambiguous. The poetic effectiveness of the Adams Cantos stems in part from his ability to make the material he selects from the Works interact in surprising ways, unrestrained by its original context. The didactic statements about early American history that Pound makes in these cantos, on the other hand, must appear to be firmly based on the text of Adams’s Works if they are to be convincing. In an attempt to procure the advantages of both stances, Pound thus seeks to give an impression of the continuous presence of his source, while at the same time refusing to specifically anchor any given line of his poem within it. The relation of the Works to the Adams Cantos is perhaps best summarised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description – in a passage Pound quoted approvingly in his essay on Remy de Gourmont – of the relationship between the poet and his work. It is ‘not to be found in individual passages, but in a mysterious pervasive essence, everywhere present and nowhere a distinct excitement’ (SP, 414). In the case of the Adams Cantos, this ‘pervasive essence’ is necessary to validate the historical authenticity of Pound’s writing and provide a basis for the claims he makes about society, government and economics. Yet the source is never allowed to intrude as a ‘direct excitement’ that may either restrict Pound’s poetic freedom or reduce the text of his poem to the peripheral status of ‘marginalia’. The manuscripts and typescripts of the Adams Cantos also provide a powerful argument against reading strategies that involve cross-referencing between the Adams Cantos and the Works. As already described in Chapter 2, while Pound initially paid close attention to the context of the fragments he drew from the Works, he quite deliberately removed material that might have encouraged readers to refer back to the source as he revised the manuscript. Page numbers that had appeared in early drafts of the sequence were eliminated, and notations identifying the speakers or specific contexts of given lines were dramatically reduced. The opening lines of the Adams Cantos, which are based on Charles Francis Adams’s Preface to the Works, may be cited as an example of how Pound’s compositional method positioned his poetry in relation to its source. In the notebook draft, these lines are recorded in such a way as to make their speaker (and thereby their context within the source) relatively clear: ‘acquitted of evil intentions or inclination to persevere in an error’ – CFA to correct it with cheerfulness particularly as to the motives of actions of the gt. nations of Europe. (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4903)

Very little was altered in the published version of these lines. Those alterations that were made, however, all served to distance the passage from its original situation in the source:

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‘Acquit of evil intention or inclination to perseverance in error to correct it with cheerfulness particularly as to the motives of actions of the great nations of Europe.’ (C, 62/341)

With the elimination of the reference to ‘CFA’, it becomes impossible to identify these lines with the editor of the Works of John Adams. Consequently, the opening lines of the Adams Cantos are redirected towards an object quite different from that of their original context in the source, meaning that the reader is most likely to interpret them as an assurance of the good intentions of either John Adams or of Pound himself. In either event, the felt presence of the Works remains vitally important. In the one case it stands as the material record wherein the sincerity of Adams’s character is recorded. In the other, Pound’s encounter with the Works is made to stand as a model of sincere historical investigation, with the poem’s basis in Adams’s own writings allowing the reader to be reasonably confident of the accuracy of the account that follows. In both cases, Pound’s omission of information relating to the passage’s original situation in the Works makes possible meanings that are not sanctioned by this source.7

Pound’s poetic achievement in the Adams Cantos While the difficulty of the Adams Cantos might indeed lead the reader to seek out clarifications in the Works of John Adams, his or her appreciation of Pound’s poetic accomplishment in the section will depend not on the ability of these cantos to redirect the reader towards their source, but rather on their ability to generate meaning independently of that source, using distinctly poetic means. The most basic way in which the poetry of the Adams Cantos functions is by associating the material culled from the Works with a relatively small number of themes. The reader quickly learns to recognise these themes: John Adams’s active and passionate intelligence; the cultivation of natural wealth and the careful attention to natural processes; the law as a means of defining the legitimate basis of authority and erecting the framework of a well-ordered state; the basic importance of economic justice to good government; and the clear definition of language, or the ‘right naming of things’. As these themes resurface, with slight variations, in relation to different types of material from the Works, and as they are intertwined with one another, the reader becomes familiar with a set of thematic relations that impart a basic understanding of what Pound calls the ‘Adams paideuma’. Within the poetic economy of the Adams Cantos, meaning is thus imparted to the textual fragments Pound has extracted from the Works as the reader learns to associate them with given thematic strands, and to appreciate the types of relations that exist between the basic themes of the sequence. This structuring device allows Pound to produce a text that exploits intricate connections between the textual fragments he has culled from Adams’s Works, while at the same time not compromising his reader’s ability to grasp the basic thrust of

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the sequence. If the surface of the text is highly complicated – sometimes seemingly intractable – its underlying structure remains very straightforward. In the blurb that he prepared for the dust-jacket of the first edition of Cantos LII–LXXI Pound drew attention to this aspect of the Adams Cantos with characteristic directness: ‘As for the form of the decad cantos 62/71,’ he tells the reader, ‘if the critic will read through them before stopping to wonder whether he or she is understanding them; I think that he or she will find at the end that he or she has.’ However incomprehensible a given reference, or line, or sequence of lines might at first seem to be, in other words, if the reader persists, an understanding of the thematic relations that are involved in the ‘Adams paideuma’ will begin to emerge. When this happens, the most basic substance of the Adams Cantos will have been understood. Subsequently, the curious reader who is so inspired might return to the text to wrestle with local effects that she or he failed to appreciate in a first reading. Locally, certain points might remain ambiguous, or give rise to open-ended questions about how one approaches the historical record, or about how a ‘poetic’ understanding of historical documents can be achieved. But the basic question, ‘what is this poem about?’ Pound assures his reader in the blurb, remains a simple one, which the conscientious reader will be able to grasp almost intuitively. If one were to adopt a critical view of Pound’s poetic method in these poems one might, of course, follow Donald Davie’s criticism of Cantos LII–LXXI and point out the contradiction between the manner in which the textual surface of the Adams Cantos seems to demand acute attention to specific details, while the large-scale structure of the sequence is controlled by the relations between a small number of themes. ‘The poetic method presses to its limit the notion that all truth is in particulars,’ Davie claims. ‘[T]he mind behind the method is thinking in generalities’ (Davie 1965, 164). And indeed, the large-scale structure of the Adams Cantos may be described in very general terms. Globally, the sequence moves from an assertion of the need to ‘rule and order’ the almost entirely unknown territory of ‘New England / from latitude 40° to 48°’ (C, 62/341) to a statement of the universal laws of nature evoked in the ‘Hymn to Zeus’ at the end of Canto 71. The reader is encouraged, that is, to believe that the fragmentary details given over the section’s eighty pages about John Adams’s life and times can, if properly considered, be understood in terms of an essentially unified vision of society and nature. The translation Pound offers of Cleanthes’ Hymn makes it clear that an understanding of the divine energy associated with Zeus can be achieved only by way of a careful examination of ‘inborn qualities of nature’, carried out so as to reveal the ‘laws’ that simultaneously govern natural and moral science: ‘Glorious, deathless of many names, Zeus aye ruling all things, founder of the inborn qualities of nature, by laws piloting all things’ (C, 256). In ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’, Pound had already expressed his admiration for John Adams as a statesman whose ‘life [was] not split into bits’ (SP, 152). Adams’s actions, that is, are informed by an essentially unified vision of society and government, which draws them into a coherent whole; a vision which, presumably, conforms to the broader unity of natural laws evoked in the ‘Hymn to Zeus’. The governing fiction of the Adams Cantos is that these poems chart the process by which an ‘empirical’ attention to individual facts opens inductively into

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a broader understanding of the natural processes that bind such facts together. John Adams’s legal activities may, in such a vision, be described as a means of mapping a territory which is both physically and morally undefined – the still largely chaotic American wilderness and the legal framework of a social order that must be reaffirmed following the abuses of authority by the British Parliament. Thus, the Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the English legal tradition that stands behind that document are presented, at the opening of Canto 62, as tools that may be used to interpret the American wilderness, providing the basis for the progressive definition of that space and its incorporation into a universal scheme of values. The ‘general map of the law’, which, for the eighteenth-century legal commentator William Blackstone, possessed the capacity to ‘[mark] out the shape of the country, it’s connexions and boundaries, it’s greater divisions and principal cities’ (Blackstone 1979, I, 35) is used in the Adams Cantos, in other words, as a tool for charting and ordering the almost entirely unknown territory of the American Continent.8 The extraordinarily rich passage which immediately follows the formal opening of Canto 62 merits attention for the way in which it evokes these ideas while at the same time sketching the background of the Adams family in New England: for the planting and ruling and ordering of New England from latitude 40° to 48° TO THE GOVERNOR AND THE COMPANIE whereon Thomas Adams 19th March 1628 18th assistant whereof the said Thomas Adams (abbreviated) Merry Mount become Braintree, a plantation near Weston’s Capn Wollanston’s became Merrymount. ten head 40 acres at 3/ (shillings) per acre who lasted 6 years, brewing commenced by the first Henry continued by Joseph Adams, his son at decease left a malting establishment. (C, 62/341)

The first eight lines of this passage are either direct quotations from or paraphrases of the Charter granted by King Charles I to the Massachusetts Bay Company on 4 March 1629.9 This use of the document begins the Adams Cantos by explicitly calling into play a unique fact of American history, reminding the reader that the relationship between Americans and the land they occupied was one initially laid out in legal terms, on official documents, and only subsequently defined in terms of direct experience. The American colonist, that is to say, was first inserted into a legal context, being then forced to translate this legal situation into an actual experience of her or his country. Pound’s reference to Thomas Adams in these lines makes clear use of this fact. His decision to cite the name of this ancestor of John Adams from the Massachusetts Bay Charter involves a move to trace his protagonist’s American heritage to a legal document ‘whereon Thomas Adams[‘s name appeared]’ – before insisting on the

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physical presence of John Adams’s ancestors on the American Continent. Following this reference to the Charter, Pound notes Thomas Adams’s relationship to the governing institution of the colony, which is established by the Charter: ‘18th assistant whereof the said Thomas Adams.’ Then, only after such legal and political contexts have been defined, is information given about the actual settlement of territory in the Massachusetts Bay colony. It might be noted, moreover, that the distinction between presence on the legal charter that appropriated the territory of Massachusetts for the colonists and the actual settlement of this land was quite a clear one in the case of Thomas Adams. A footnote which Pound marked in his copy of the Works records that: ‘the records of the Massachusetts Company whilst in London … show Thomas Adams [was] an active and efficient member of the Board, contributing as largely from his private fortunes to the colonization as any one; but he never himself came to America’ (WJA I, 3–4). In choosing to begin the Adams Cantos with a reference to this individual, Pound therefore demonstrates a desire to directly link John Adams to a legal title that is distinct from his family’s physical settlement of the American Continent. In the process, he makes a more general point about the basis of the American experience in British law. The Charter is an important document because it spells out the assumption of the colonists’ right to occupy and ‘order’ the unknown territory of Massachusetts, and because it establishes the basis of such order in the legal concepts that will be used to define the territory. It both anticipates the contents of the land and defines its boundaries by referring to established systems of belief (Christianity) and of measurement (lines of latitude and the boundaries of existing colonies), while remaining in almost complete ignorance of the actual features of the terrain. It will be the colonists’ task to provide the basis in lived experience that will give real content to the legal form of the Charter.10 The remainder of this opening passage of Canto 62 moves from the establishment of a legal title to the land of Massachusetts to a presentation of the actual settlement of the colony: ten head 40 acres at 3/ (shillings) per acre who lasted 6 years, brewing commenced by the first Henry continued by Joseph Adams, his son at decease left a malting establishment. (C, 62/341)

Having traced John Adams’s connection with the Charter, Pound now works to establish the physical bond that links his family to a specific parcel of land in Braintree. The family brewery (although not the more standard agricultural image used so frequently throughout The Cantos) is cited as evidence that the Adams family has engaged in a productive, artisanal relationship with nature. This brewery was built on land which they purchased at a fair price (thus owned and not liable to be eaten away by parasitical debt attached to it by bankers) and carried on by the industry of two generations of Adamses. Through this relationship, ‘commenced by the first Henry’ and ‘continued by Joseph Adams’, the legal inheritance derived obliquely from the Thomas Adams of the Charter is given a definite, physical form. When the reader is finally introduced to John Adams,

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he or she is therefore given a protagonist who is firmly established on the American Continent, both in his legal rights and in a productive relationship to the land that gives substance to these rights. It is no coincidence that ‘establishment’ is the last word to appear in the poem before Adams’s birth is recorded, reinforcing, as it does, the solidity of the foundation from which Adams will be shown to work throughout the remainder of the section. Both the subject of this opening passage (that of establishing social relations adapted to the largely unknown American Continent, while using a set of legal concepts drawn from a foreign context) and the poetic method Pound employs in presenting it will be developed at length throughout the ten cantos that follow. *** Within the large-scale structure of the Adams Cantos, this ‘mapping’ of the ‘Adams paideuma’ culminates in the affirmation of the transcendental ideal expressed by way of Cleanthes’ ‘Hymn to Zeus’, with the felt presence of a comprehensive source-text working to ensure the unity and the historical validity of the sequence. More locally, the poetic impact of Pound’s method depends upon the effective juxtaposition of the fragments he selects sequentially from the Works as he quotes from this source in what he would describe elsewhere as ‘extended fragmentation’.11 Peter Nicholls has very usefully described Pound’s method as being one of ‘writing through’ his source (Nicholls 2003, 43) – that is to say, proceeding through it sequentially, producing an original piece of writing by transcribing material found therein.12 In this way, Pound places himself in a position to generate poetic effects by juxtaposing the blocks of material he extracts as he ‘writes through’ the Works. David Moody, in his essay ‘Composition in the Adams Cantos’, recognises the importance of such juxtapositions and describes them by employing a musical metaphor. He rightly criticises reading strategies that urge too heavy a reliance on the Works of John Adams, arguing that ‘when we go back to the source … [w]e end up being only the more confused; and feeling that Pound has given us only scraps and orts of a [text] which would be much better read as Adams wrote it’ (Moody 1992, 82). Rather than reading the Adams Cantos in relation to their source, he encourages a reading that focuses upon Pound’s interweaving of motifs he has drawn from the Works. Read in this way, he argues, the Adams Cantos may be seen as ‘formidably controlled writing, with nothing of the ragbag about [them]’ (ibid.). In his response to Pound’s cantos of the 1930s and 1940s, William Carlos Williams likewise insisted on the importance of focusing on the poetic qualities of Pound’s work. Instead of using a musical metaphor to describe what Pound had done, however, Williams made use of an architectural image, speaking of Pound constructing his ‘Adams paideuma’ out of ‘building blocks’ (Laughlin 1987, 116). While it was intended in part to mock the didactic impulse in Cantos LII–LXXI, Williams’s description was also perceptive, in that it captured the way in which Pound set blocks of related material from the Works beside one another in the Adams Cantos. Such blocks are generally related to a single theme, or at most to two interwoven thematic strands, and relations between material within such blocks of text are generally reinforced by poetic devices such as repetition, alliteration or assonance.

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While the large-scale structure of the Adams Cantos comes into focus slowly as the reader gradually perceives the relations that exist between such blocks of material, the poetic effects in any given passage have an immediate impact. It is at this local level that Pound’s ability to shape an effective modern idiom from his eighteenthand nineteenth-century source comes to the fore, and, while it has been consistently underappreciated, his poetic achievement on this point is considerable. As Williams perceived, much of the satisfaction of reading the Adams Cantos comes from ‘the way the words are joined in the common line’ of Pound’s poetry, so as to create a verse whose rhythms are in step with the common speech of his own time (Williams 1973, 124). As one reads the Adams Cantos, one is conscious of the written record with which one is engaging – that of Adams’s Works, needless to say, but also that of the numerous other texts that intersect with the Works, by way of Adams’s reading, his correspondence, Charles Francis Adams’s apparatus and other sources. At the same time, however, this textual space is inhabited by a voice that speaks directly to an audience of Pound’s own time. Carol Cantrell emphasises the uniquely American quality of the voice Pound was able to shape from Adams’s Works: Adams was for Pound what Williams wanted Washington to be for him – an alter ego. Most important for Pound, Adams gave him an American voice. (Cantrell 1989, 158)13

It is not necessary to read Adams as a mouthpiece or alter-ego for Pound, however, to appreciate the care Pound exercised in shaping the sounds and rhythms of his verse out of the material he had culled from the Works. The poetry of the Adams Cantos depends, at the local level, on the reader’s ability to perceive connections between related material, to sense shifts from one block of material to another and to place the emphasis appropriately on the key elements in a given line or passage. In order to accomplish this, Pound makes heavy use of repetition, of assonance and of alliteration to reinforce the associations he intends in his verse. By way of example, in an elevenline passage from Canto 67, which deals with Adams’s role in drafting the Constitution of Massachusetts, all of these devices are used to reinforce the connections within the passage: Fixed laws of their own making equitable mode of making the laws impartial and of apt execution. Freeholders of an estate of 3 L/ per annum or any estate to the value of 60 pounds. Duty of legislators and magistrates to cherish the interest of literature … and principles of … good humour … (Constitution of Massachusetts) I was apprehensive in particular that ‘natural history’ and ‘good humour’ wd/ be struck out (C, 67/392)

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Each of the basic themes that are intertwined in this passage – law, just economics and passionate intelligence – are emphasised by the repetition of a key word or phrase: ‘law’, ‘estate’ and ‘good humour’. This repetition is further reinforced by the alliteration of other key words: ‘mode’, ‘making’, ‘magistrates’ and ‘Massachusetts’, for example; or ‘equitable’, ‘execution’ and ‘estate’. Finally, assonance and internal rhymes have a role to play in binding the passage together, as in the association established between ‘humour’, ‘literature’, ‘legislator’ and ‘freeholder’. By the same token, the poetry of the Adams Cantos possesses formidable energy because of the way in which Pound manages the material he selects from his source. Changes in rhythm are exploited to emphasise key ideas. Strong enjambment is employed to push the reader from one block of text to another and the active voice is consistently employed – often without an identifiable subject attached to the verb, so as to generalise the action described (as in the opening line of the sequence, ‘acquit of evil intention’ [C, 62/341]). In the small pamphlet entitled Notes on Ezra Pound’s Cantos: Structure & Metric, which accompanied the first 500 copies of New Directions’ edition of Cantos LII–LXXI, Delmore Schwartz singled out Pound’s meter as the most interesting technical feature of the book. He concluded that [a] good deal more analysis will be necessary before one can be prepared to advance more than a hypothesis as to the metrical system of the Cantos, but tentatively and as an initial hypothesis, one can say that they show at great length a dominant rhythm which has its roots in a trochaic base. When we remember that most English poetry has an iambic base, the radical nature of the change becomes obvious. In the Cantos, the dominant foot is trochaic and the chief variations become anapestic and spondaic; while in most English verse the chief variation is the trochee. (Laughlin 1940, 15)

It would be a mistake to apply this observation too systematically to the Adams Cantos, as Schwartz himself recognises. But it is true that Pound frequently uses a trochee or a spondee, particularly at the end of a line, to emphasise a key idea, or to signal a shift in direction. Consider, for example, the following lines from Canto 65: easy to see that France and England wd/ try to embroil us OBvious that all powers of Europe will be continually at manoeuvre to work us into their real or imaginary balances of power; J. A. 1782 FISHERIES our natural right (C, 65/377)

The two key transitions in this passage – from the specific statement about France and England to the general one about European powers, and from the comments on US foreign relations to the statement about the New England fisheries – come at the end of a line, and are marked by a strong trochaic foot. In each case Pound’s typography contributes to the sense of this rhythm – particularly in the case of ‘OBvious’. This passage also includes several fine examples of the strong enjambment that is such an

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important part of the technical repertoire of the Adams Cantos, contributing to the energy of Pound’s poetry and impelling the reader to move from one block of text to the next. A final observation to be made about Pound’s poetic technique in the Adams Cantos is that he goes further in this section than he had ever done before in orchestrating the textual space of each page of his poem. The spatial arrangement of the words on the page conditions the reader’s response to what Pound has written in important ways. And he exploited every means available to him to enrich this feature of his poem: irregular indentations and punctuation, capitalisations of entire words or phrases, the isolation of given words or phrases on the page, lines drawn in the margins of the text, the placement of Chinese characters in the body of the text – all of these things graphically extended the procedures of Pound’s earlier documentary cantos, and anticipated the more generalised use of Chinese characters that would become a major feature of his work, beginning with the Pisan Cantos and continuing for the rest of his career. In the Introduction to his edition of the Pisan Cantos, Richard Sieburth speaks of Pound’s preparation of a typescript from his manuscript notebooks as resulting ‘in a more precise and expressive scoring of [the] words on the page’ (Sieburth 2003, xxvi). Pound’s care with the typescripts of the Adams Cantos was likewise crucial to his poetry. In an important way, the Adams Cantos are ‘performed’ on the reader’s eye as it moves over the page, serving as the intermediary to her or his intellect. Pound made the importance of the section’s typography clear in a 1939 letter to Hubert Creekmore: ALL typographic disposition, placings of words on the page, is intended to facilitate the reader’s intonation, whether he be reading silently to self or aloud to friends. Given time and technique I might even put down the musical notation of passages or ‘breaks into song’… . The order of words and sounds ought to induce the proper reading; proper tone of voice, etc., but can not redeem fools from idiocy, etc. If the goddam violin string is not tense, no amount of bowing will help the player. And so forth. (SL, 322–3)

His printers’ instructions for the Faber and Faber first edition of Cantos LII–LXXI likewise demonstrate his care on such points. A note entitled ‘Directions and Suggestions to Printer’ includes the following warning: This narrative is excessively COMPRESSED. A great deal of the punctuation normally used in prose has been OMITTED. especially where two people repeat the same words often after a lapse of centuries, the quotations are often left open. Sometimes started and left without a close / also in some cases the different speakers appear, so to speak ‘fore and aft’ of the words. (Faber)

Elsewhere in the same note, he instructed the printer to

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Please follow all EXCENTRICITIES of punctuation/ indent the lines so indented in the ms/ but avoid unnecessary irregularities of indentations/ (Faber)14

He even took care to ensure that the spacing between words was handled in such a way as to maximise the visual impact of what he had written, telling the printer to ‘please leave DOUBLE SPACE BETWEEN WORDS save in long lines where this wd/ necessitate a lap over’ (Faber). It may be argued that this ‘scoring’ of the poetic page has a special relevance for the Adams Cantos, since these poems are based on a confrontation with the written record, and since Pound seeks throughout the section to poetically exploit the complexity of the intertextual space of the ‘Adams paideuma’, enacting the manner in which readers gain an understanding of the past through a confrontation with written records. As Jean-Michel Rabaté very usefully remarks, ‘[h]istory [in the Adams Cantos] is grasped as a series of concentric eddies which discloses its real source: a book’ (Rabaté 1986, 116). This dynamic is everywhere present in the section, but it is most pronounced in Cantos 64–68, which are based on the political and legal works which Adams published during his lifetime. In the opening lines of Canto 67, for example, Adams’s engagement with the British legal tradition is used to establish a link between his own thought and the unwritten ‘folcright’ of Anglo-Saxon England: Whereof memory of man runneth not to the contrary Dome Book, Ina, Offa and Aethelbert, folcright for a thousand years (C, 67/387)

Here, knowledge of the past – and the sense of historical continuity that springs from such knowledge – is shown to depend upon a series of readerly reinterpretations of legal texts. The record of such readerly activity is to be found in documents such as the ‘Dome Book’, documents that come into being though the collection, editing and reorganisation of a body of material rooted in the earlier tradition of a ‘folcright’ which is of higher antiquity than memory or history can reach; [a body of customs which] have been used time out of mind, or from a time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. (WJA III, 540)

The ‘Dome Book’ itself, compiled by Edward the Confessor, is by no means an isolated document, but rather a fresh promulgation of a legal code established by a previous monarch; one who had, in his turn, engaged in a reading and reworking of even earlier material:15 king Alfred, who began his reign in 871, magnus juris Anglicani conditor, the great founder of the laws of England, with the advice of his wise men, collected out of the laws of Ina, Offa, and Æthelbert, such as were the best, and made them to

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extend equally to the whole nation, and therefore very properly called them the common law of England, because those laws were now first of all made common to the whole English nation…folcright, that is, the people’s right, set down in one code. (WJA III, 541)

Later documents such as the Magna Carta, in their turn, take their place within this tradition – rereading and reaffirming the heritage of English Common Law. And still later legal compilers and commentators such as Sir Edward Coke and William Blackstone similarly use their readings of past texts to pull this legal tradition into a shape that is suited to the exigencies of their own historical moments. Indeed, Coke’s importance in the Adams Cantos, as a reader of the Magna Carta and as an intermediary between John Adams and that document, is such as to lead at least one reader of the section to claim that he single-handedly constitutes a separate theme in these cantos: ‘a … theme which has no one particular tag … is the theme of Coke’ (Makin 1992, 65). Pound’s own engagement with the textual remains of John Adams’s thought, as gathered by Charles Francis Adams, takes its place within this same tradition. As in less overtly documentary cantos, a key part of Pound’s project in the Adams Cantos was to fashion a style that would allow him to present the past ‘ply over ply’ until his reader gradually came to realise that, to use Hugh Kenner’s description of The Pisan Cantos, ‘all times could lie on the same plane’ (Kenner 1971, 30). In the Adams Cantos this ‘plane’ may be associated with the printed page upon which textual matter from a variety of historical periods is combined. Thus, in the opening lines of Canto 67, the words of King Alfred’s code, its adaptation in Edward the Confessor’s ‘Dome Book’, Magna Carta’s reaffirmation of the legal rights of British subjects, Coke’s legal commentaries based on these and other documents, and John Adams’s appropriation of this legal tradition as a response to the exigencies of late eighteenth-century America are laid together on the page of Pound’s poem with little regard for their relative situations within a chronological sequence of events. What is important is not that the reader of the Adams Cantos feel the distance that separates the work of Alfred from that of Coke, that of Coke from that of Adams, or that of all these actors in the ‘Adams paideuma’ from the work of Pound himself. Rather, it is essential that the reader grasp the relation between the fragments Pound has juxtaposed within the textual space of his poem. As Hugh Kenner notes, using the discovery of Palaeolithic cave paintings at the beginning of the twentieth century as the point of departure for broader statements about Pound’s poetics, the poetry makes possible a keenly felt experience of how ‘time fold[s] over; [so that] now lay[s] flat, transparent, upon not now’ (ibid.). The poetry of the Adams Cantos thus functions on several levels. In individual passages, it exploits relations of sound and rhythm that Pound establishes within blocks of related material he has excised from the Works. Likewise, the sequence is characterised by the forceful, sometimes surprising, transitions Pound effects between one such block of material and the next. On another level, the poetry functions visually on the space of each page, encouraging the reader to perceive meanings by way of its typographical arrangement. At the level of the sequence as a whole, the intertwining and repetition of the themes that are of basic importance to Pound’s ‘Adams paideuma’

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work to encourage a general understanding of the section’s subject matter. At the same time, the felt presence of Pound’s source, and the repeated folding together of varied material from the textual record in the sequence, spur the reader to reflect in a more theoretical manner on the relation in which one text stands to another, and on the manner in which material textuality conditions the understanding of the past. In this way, the Adams Cantos may be seen as a precursor to more contemporary experiments in source-based poetics, like those of Susan Howe, or like the ‘erasure poetry’ of Mary Ruefle or Jen Bervin.16

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4

The Representation of History and Law in the Adams Cantos Whatever aesthetic judgement one might make about the Adams Cantos, it is also important that one be very clear about the limitations of Pound’s representation of history in these poems. The Adams Cantos are not a poem like William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, with its alignment of competing discourses presented in a variety of poetic modes; or like Susan Howe’s ‘Melville’s Marginalia’, with its dramatisation of an individual’s struggle to make sense of written documents, and its insistence that ‘[a] poet does not relate real events … [f]or then she would clash with the historian’ (Howe 1993, 94); or like Jen Bervin’s Nets, with its aestheticisation of the textual space of its source. In contrast to such poems, the Adams Cantos seek to transmit very definite knowledge about the past, which might be taken as the basis for collective action on behalf of good government. This didactic ambition poses basic questions about the public responsibilities of the poet and about the ability of poetry to transmit historical knowledge. Pound’s ambitions for the Adams Cantos are precisely what Donald Davie had in mind when he made his oft-quoted remark that [w]hatever more long term effect Pound’s disastrous career may have on American and British poetry, it seems inevitable that it will rule out (has ruled out already, for serious writers) any idea that poetry can or should operate in the dimension of history… . History from now on may be transcended in poetry, or it may be evaded there; but poetry is not the place where it may be understood. (Davie 1965, 244)

The questions of whether poetry might ever be a site wherein history may be understood, or of whether, in certain circumstances, the poet might be compelled to ‘clash with the historian’ go far beyond the scope of this book. It is sufficient to observe that Pound answered both questions in the affirmative and that in Cantos LII–LXXI he set out to produce a work that would be effective both as poetry and as a vehicle for transmitting essential historical knowledge. An evaluation of how effectively the Adams Cantos perform the latter function is thus inescapable in any assessment of the section. Two points regarding Pound’s representation of history in the section particularly merit discussion: the consequences of his ambition to make the Adams Cantos a source of historical knowledge on his representation of individual subjectivity and the manner in which his poetic method necessarily distorts the historical data contained in his source.

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The representation of the historical subject in the Adams Cantos One of the more obvious difficulties Pound faced in the Adams Cantos was that of offering a credible representation of individual subjectivity, while at the same time using the Works to propose a broad, public ‘Adams paideuma’. In his description of Pound’s attempts to write history using documentary techniques in the Malatesta Cantos, Lawrence Rainey points out the importance Pound attributed to exceptional individuals: ‘Civilisation is made by men of unusual intelligence’, [Pound] had written in 1917, stating an assumption that not only conditioned his reflections on art and society but also had practical consequences for study of the past. To write history entailed a study of personality and sensibility, an exploration of the characterological depths that animated cultural development. (Rainey 1991, 117)

Such concern for characterological depth was indeed an important part of his efforts to ‘include history’ in The Cantos, and it is doubtful whether he would ever have explicitly rejected its importance.1 There are, however, certain contradictions in his attitude on the question. Even in the Malatesta Cantos, the task of achieving a formal balance between the representation of Sigismondo’s ‘characterological depths’ and his public activity had been precarious. In the end it would be achieved by arranging material drawn from a wide range of sources and filtered through different points of view around the stable centre provided by the Tempio Malatestiano. By the time he came to write the Adams Cantos, however, Pound’s concern with public affairs had grown to become the almost exclusive subject of his poetry. He was, consequently, much less prepared to acknowledge the lack of neat continuity between public and private spheres than he had been in the Malatesta Cantos. His presentation of John Adams rather relies on the idea that the individual’s public life may be read as an extension of his private affairs. His concept of an ‘Adams paideuma’ itself registers a powerful tension between the individual subject (John Adams) and the broad, public formation in which he participates (the ‘paideuma’). It is the organic unity of this ‘paideuma’, more than any chronicle of events or analysis of the intellectual contexts within which Adams worked, that Pound hoped to reflect in his poetry. In accordance with this priority, his poetic method repeatedly blurs the boundaries between John Adams’s individual subjectivity and the public debates in which he participated. Alec Marsh, who follows Tim Redman in identifying Pound’s belief in a continuity between individual virtù and public policy, summarises this tension by noting that Pound did not, could not, distinguish between public policy and private expression. This inability led to a real confusion, however, at the level of self. Pound’s ideal statesman was simultaneously Jefferson and Mussolini, a kind of collective individual, who, as the embodiment of the will of the people, had become therefore a corporate, or at least a collective self. (Marsh 1998, 238–39)

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In the Adams Cantos, the confusion between the ‘Adams paideuma’ and John Adams is everywhere apparent. While they never explicitly cease to celebrate the role played by ‘men of exceptional intelligence’ in shaping history, the Adams Cantos repeatedly blur the contours of individual subjectivity. The proper names that people the section refer only marginally to historical subjects who possess genuine characterological depth. What is more important is how these names gesture towards the ‘complex of ideas’ Pound associates with the ‘Adams paideuma’. The development of a short passage from Canto 62 in which Pound makes a distinction between the rule of law and the temper of individuals offers a particularly salient example of this feature of the Adams Cantos. Immediately following Pound’s account of Adams’s defence of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, this passage urges a conception of law as a ‘mind without feeling’ – composed from the finest thought of different historical eras, and not subject to the idiosyncrasies of any given individual’s passions or imagination. Pound’s juxtapositions of material from the Works establish a sharp contrast between mere human blighters common men like the rest of us subjekk to passions (C, 62/343)

and law not bent to wanton imagination and temper of individuals mens sine affectu (C, 62/343)

The passage then moves on to describe this ‘mind without feeling’ in a manner that entirely disregards the contours of the individuals who stand behind the material from the source which Pound cites. If one examines the notebook draft of the seven lines that follow, one finds that Pound has, as usual, been careful to note the points at which his excision of lines from the source has fragmented the original text and to record page numbers so as to facilitate reference back to the Works. He also makes at least a minimal effort to attribute individual phrases to the subjects who are responsible for them: And law rules that it be sine affectu ———— ———— P 115 Bad law the worst sort of tyranny (Burke). == dispute right to seize lands of the heathen

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+ give it to any blame king ———— 121 == if we are feudatory parliament has no authority (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4903)

Of these four transcriptions from the Works only the final one has its source directly in words spoken or written by John Adams (and even it is heavily rooted in his reading of English law and legal commentaries). The first line quoted above has its basis in a phrase of Algernon Sidney, upon which Pound composes a brief variation. The second, as Pound notes, is drawn from an address given by Edmund Burke, while the third is derived from a reply of uncertain authorship to a speech made by Governor Hutchinson. Once he had assembled this raw material, however, Pound demonstrated a remarkable lack of concern for the sources in which it was originally rooted, choosing to effect combinations that draw out thematic and aural connections, while actively disrupting his reader’s ability to associate individual lines with a given speaker or writer. Thus, as he prepared the rough typescript for Canto 62, he eliminated all the markings that indicate how the material was extracted from his source, suppressed one of the page references that might have allowed his reader to refer back to the Works and displaced Edmund Burke’s name in such a way as to make it difficult to identify its relation to surrounding material: that law rules that it be sine affectu, in 1770 in Bastun p; 115 Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny (Burke) disputed right to seize lands of the heathen and give it to any king if we be feudatory parliament has no controll over us (EPP, Beinecke, 75, 3360)

In the final version of Canto 62 such gestures have been carried still further. All references to pages in the source have now been eliminated and Burke’s name – once clearly attached to the statement he made – has been implanted into the poem in such a way as to make it all but impossible to ascertain which statement should actually be attributed to him: that law rules that it be since affectu in 1770, Bastun. Bad law is the worst sort of tyranny. Burke disputed right to seize lands of the heathen

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and give it to any king, If we be feudatory parliament has no control over us (C, 62/343)

Cited as the author of an identifiable phrase in Pound’s notebook draft, Edmund Burke becomes, in the published poem, little more than a name that hangs loosely in the text. His name fits better into the syntax of the poetry if it is associated with the line that follows it (‘disputed right to seize lands of the heathen’ – a line actually based in the reply to Governor Hutchinson) rather than the line actually drawn from his own speech. Neither reading, however, is without its problems; and, in the absence of the excised page references, the reader has no way of clarifying this point. In fact, one of the features that most regularly characterises Pound’s citational strategy in the Adams Cantos is his tendency to blur or eliminate personal pronouns that would allow his reader to gain a clear sense of which subject is responsible for a given speech or action. In so doing, he distances actors from the actions they perform, speakers from the words they speak and writers from their works. A passage from Canto 63, which is based on Adams’s Autobiography (volume two of the Works) and describes his early study of the law, is typical of this tendency: Gridley enquired my method of study and gave me Reeve’s advice to his nephew read a letter he wrote to Judge Leighton: follow the study rather than gain of the law, but the gain enough to keep out of the briars, So that I believe no lawyer ever did so much business for so little profit as I during the 17 years that I practised you must conquer the INSTITUTES and I began with Coke upon Littleton greek mere matter of curiosity (in the law) to ask Mr Thatcher’s concurrence whole evening on original sin and the plan of the universe and lastly on law (C, 63/352)

The proper names in this extended passage in no way gesture towards historical subjects who possess characterological depth and interact with Adams in a coherent fashion. Their significance is confined to the fact that they imply the existence of a community of legal experts that Adams’s study permits him to enter. Pound makes little effort to represent the intricacies of their individual thought or even to clearly delineate a written space that corresponds to each name. The reader is never told, for example, what ‘Reeve’s advice to his nephew’ was, nor given the contents of the ‘letter he wrote to Judge Leighton’. Pound’s compositional method may even be said to actively disrupt attempts to make clear connections between historical subjects and the words they author or the actions they perform. The use of a colon after the mention of ‘Judge Leighton’, for

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example, does not correspond to any punctuation in the Works, but marks instead the end of one of the fragments Pound has excised from this source. Its presence creates ambiguity as to the source of the advice to ‘follow the study rather than gain of the law’. One might naturally assume that this advice is contained within the letter that Gridley wrote to the judge. Yet there is in fact absolutely no connection in the source between this letter and the advice, which was given by Gridley in conversation. Likewise, the use of a comma to separate the conclusion of this advice (‘but the gain / enough to keep out of the briars’,) and a fragment Pound interpolates from a footnote in the Works (‘so that I / believe no lawyer ever did so much business / for so little profit as I during the 17 years that I practised’) further contributes to confusion concerning the actions of the individuals involved in the passage. Since there is no clear break between the advice (which the reader is likely to consider as having its source in Gridley) and the reference to seventeen years of legal practice, it is entirely possible for the reader to assume that the ‘I’ in question is Gridley and not John Adams. The shift to the first-person pronoun, following the logic of such a reading, could be easily explained by the assumption that Pound is now quoting Gridley directly as he reads from the letter ‘he wrote to Judge Leighton’. For the ‘I’ to be taken as John Adams (the actual source of the line), Pound’s reader must recognise that the comma employed signifies the conclusion of Gridley’s advice, creating a break in the syntax of the text that will be followed by a return to the first-person voice of John Adams. In the lines that follow the tone of the poetry then shifts abruptly: you must conquer the INSTITUTES and I began with Coke upon Littleton (C, 63/352)

This type of injunction is extremely common in the Adams Cantos. It is made in such a way as to affirm the authority of a legal corpus at the same time as it clouds the identity of subjects who make use of it. No indication is given in the canto that the speaker of these two lines is different from the one who has just evoked ‘the 17 years that I practised’. Yet in fact they are not the same. The first speaker is John Adams, his comment on the small profit he made in his legal practice having its source in a footnote appended to his Autobiography. The second speaker is Gridley, whose conversation is remembered by Adams and related at some length in the Autobiography. And again, reference to Pound’s notebook draft for this passage shows that this blurring of the identities of the historical subjects who people the section stems not from carelessness but from the nature of Pound’s poetic procedure. He transcribed the fragments on which these lines were based relatively faithfully into his poetry notebook: I believe no lawyer ever did so much business for so little profit as I during the 17 years that I practised — you must conquer the INSTITUTES —

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I began with C-Lit. + broke through (EPP, Beinecke, 115, 4904, p. 17v.)

Yet as he developed these notes in subsequent drafts, Pound focused on the communal legal space that Adams was seeking to enter. In the process, he quite willingly allowed the identities of the individual subjects to whom these lines specifically relate to be effaced. A final example of the way in which Pound’s difficulty in representing individual subjectivity blurred his rendering of historical events is the case of Alexander Hamilton. The Hamilton presented in the Adams Cantos is a crude caricature of the historical man. His position is quickly established as being that of the chief opponent to the sort of just circulation of money within a stable system of govenrment that John Adams seeks to ensure by way of his legal and political work. Beyond this very basic economic opposition, almost no effort is made in the Adams Cantos to relate Hamilton to the political debates of his time. The reader is, consequently, left with scant idea of his positions on a number of other important subjects raised in the Adams Cantos. Pound simply moves to align him with (to use the terms he employs in ‘A Visiting Card’) ‘a force which divides’, making him an enemy of that force which ‘contemplates the unity of the mystery’ (SP, 306). He thus makes no effort to render this highly complex and contradictory figure in any depth. Inevitably, Pound’s refusal to represent the full range of Hamilton’s activities or to insert his political and economic thought within its full historical context leads to a series of contradictions, which will be disturbing to a reader with even a basic appreciation of late eighteenth-century American history. In celebrating the success of Washington’s Presidency, for example, the Adams Cantos implicitly support Hamilton’s work as Secretary of Treasury during Washington’s first administration, while refusing to ever associate him with the President. Their celebration of Adams’s appointment of Washington at the head of the American armies in 1798 likewise places them in a contradictory position with regard to Alexander Hamilton, whose role as Washington’s second in command and de facto field commander following this decision can be ignored only by an account that dramatically simplifies the political landscape of the time.2 Yet by far the most serious contradiction inherent in Pound’s presentation lies in the fact that the same Alexander Hamilton whom he presents as being deficient ‘in early moral foundations’ was also a major proponent and joint author of the US Constitution: a document which Pound unreservedly celebrates both in his prose and throughout The Cantos.3 Indeed, if Pound’s poem were to engage in a balanced survey of the political and intellectual currents of early American history, a number of powerful similarities between Adams and Hamilton would have to be suggested. Both men were trained as lawyers and were fascinated by constitutional law. Each, in his turn, struggled with the problem of employing a tradition of English Common Law based in unwritten jus non scriptum as a guide for drafting written constitutions which could be used for the administration of vast and largely unexplored territories on the American Continent.4 The two men were likewise in substantial agreement on the attitude to be adopted towards France during the years of Adams’s

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Presidency, and both argued for the necessity of placing a strong military power under the authority of the Federal government.5 Hamilton, like Adams, believed, furthermore, that it was necessary for substantial power to be vested in the Executive branch of a strong Federal government. Finally, and crucially, the belief in a ‘balance’ of political powers, which Pound repeatedly quotes John Adams as asserting in the Adams Cantos, was strongly shared by Alexander Hamilton. This principle would, of course, receive its definitive statement within the American political context in the first three articles of the United States Constitution, which Hamilton had so important a hand in drafting. Here, the respective powers of the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of government are spelled out, in a triumphant realisation of the ‘distinct separation of legislative, executive and judicial’ (C, 67/394) functions for which Adams calls in Pound’s poem. Hamilton, like Adams, was concerned with fashioning a governmental order ‘to the end that no branch by swelling’ might disturb the balance between the ‘one, the few, the many … / Regis optimatium populique’ (C, 68/395). Even the philosophical background upon which Hamilton drew in framing the Constitution was similar to that used by Adams in passages of his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Each man was influenced by theories of mixed government derived from the thought of Aristotle and Polybius, using them to argue for the combination of elements of rule by ‘the many, the few and the one’ within a single governmental system. And both Hamilton and Adams took the further step of theorising ways of combining such mixed government with the concept of separation of powers they had inherited from thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu. When he read the Constitution, John Adams was quick to respond favourably to the definition of balanced government which it proposed. This document was, he remarked, ‘if not the greatest exertion of human understanding … the greatest single effort of national deliberation that the world has ever seen’ (WJA VI, 220). Such agreement on what is arguably the central theme of the Adams Cantos would seemingly oblige Pound to adopt a more nuanced stance with regard to Hamilton. Yet it was entirely ignored by Pound, who instead assigned Hamilton the simplified role of financial villain within his ‘Adams paideuma’; a straw man that could be used to more neatly point out the justice of Adams’s views on economic matters.

John Adams speaking?: Gaps in meaning between the Works of John Adams and the Adams Cantos In the same way as it creates confusion at the level of individual subjectivity, Pound’s poetic method inevitably leads him to distort the historical data contained in his source. By offering the Adams Cantos as a sort of substitute for the Works, while at the same time using the fact that they are based on that source to suggest that their account of early American history is authentic and accurate, Pound places his reader

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in a difficult position with regard to the Works. Prevented from engaging directly with the source-text that underwrites Pound’s presentation of historical events, the reader of the Adams Cantos is often left to feel as though he or she is being made to overhear Pound’s interaction with an authority to which she or he has no immediate access. Indeed, Pound even occasionally plays the part of a reader who has got to the source before his audience, placing marks in the margin beside especially important passages, lest anyone miss the point: Every bank of discount is downright corruption taxing the public for private individuals’ gain. and if I say this in my will the American people wd/ pronounce I died crazy. (C, 71/416)

Obviously, some distortion of the source is to be expected, given the nature of Pound’s compositional strategy in the Adams Cantos. What is troubling, however, is the unstated degree of liberty he allows himself to adapt material from the Works, while at the same time implying that his poetry has the ability to make definite historical statements owing to its basis in this authorita­ tive source. Time after time Pound changes the meanings of passages in the Works by way of the excisions, paraphrases and misreadings that characterise his compositional process. Yet because nearly every line of the Adams Cantos has its origin in the Works he nevertheless adopts the stance that, like John Adams, he does ‘not suggest anything on [his] own’ (C, 62/342). Pound’s interaction with the source remains, in this sense, inaccessible. One is left, as it were, to read the Works of John Adams over Pound’s shoulder; considering only those fragments that he culled from the text and running the risk of accepting the ideological assumptions imprinted by his reading strategy as though they were an integral part of the source itself. The dangerous implications of this situation are concisely illustrated by a passage in Canto 65, which concerns the trip John Adams took to Amsterdam with his sons John Quincy and Charles in the summer of 1780, in an attempt to negotiate a loan for the American colonies. One observes here, by comparing the Adams Cantos to their source, that Pound’s compositional strategy allows him to impose his own antiSemitism on John Adams’s observation of the country through which he is passing, creating a set of meanings whose tenor is radically different from anything sanctioned by the Works. Pound writes: with my two sons to Amsterdam rye barley oats beans hemp grain clover lucern and sainfoin and the pavements are good, vines cattle sheep everything plentiful such wheat crops never saw elsewhere church music Italian style a tapestry: number of jews stabbing the wafer blood gushing from it

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Brussels stone same as Braintree North Common … excellent character, emperor did not like him intermixture houses trees ships canals very startling neatness remarkable Van der Capellen tot de Pol fears holders of English funds will etc/ tried to end some feudal burdens about here and got himself censured O.K., as was Van Berckel (C, 65/375–6)

The basic thematic strands which control the development of these eighteen lines will be highly familiar by this stage of the sequence. Adams’s attention to the agricultural basis of Dutch society picks up on one of the Adams Cantos’ most basic assumptions. It corresponds neatly with passages which illustrate his attention to similar questions in America and, most especially, in his own farming practices at Braintree, Massachusetts. As the relatively small number of motifs Pound includes in this passage are intertwined around this central idea, it becomes clear that he is suggesting a relationship between the natural abundance Adams notices on his journey to Amsterdam and the presence of a just social and economic order, which ensures that this wealth is distributed in a fair manner. The ‘Italian church music’ and ‘intermixture houses trees ships canals’ are to be identified with such cultural health, while the ‘holders of English funds’ and the persistence of ‘feudal burdens’ serve to indicate the parasitic encroachments of economic injustice and usury into this order. Unfortunately, the only plausible way of reading the line ‘a tapestry: number of jews stabbing the wafer’ within this carefully constructed description is to ally it with forces of cultural and economic dissipation. It offers an immediate counterpoint to the ‘church music Italian style’ and introduces an economic threat to the natural abundance and cultural order noted elsewhere in the passage – one that is picked up by the ‘holders of English funds’ and that silently threatens Adams’s efforts to negotiate a just loan with the Dutch while in Amsterdam. The wafer stands as a symbol of the coherent social and religious unity that is tied up in the natural abundance Adams admires, and the Jews are presented as an alien force, attacking this unity from the outside and bleeding it of its vitality. Nothing in the source itself warrants the inclusion of Adams’s remarks on the tapestry in a passage that works to advance such a vision. The account of his visit to the cathedral in Brussels, which is part of his diary, has this to say about the tapestry: A picture in a tapestry was hung up, of a number of Jews stabbing the wafer, the bon Dieu, and blood gushing in streams from the bread. This insufferable piece of pious villainy shocked me beyond measure; but thousands were before it, on their knees, adoring. (WJA III, 268)

By detaching Adams’s description of the tapestry from this judgement and by placing the material he culled from the source in a context where it offers a stark contrast to

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the plentiful countryside, the Italian Church music, and the ordered towns, Pound utterly transformed Adams’s account of his visit to the cathedral, recasting it in a way that only a reader who methodically checked every line of his sequence against its source would think to question.

‘Conservative revolution’ and John Adams’s legal sensibility: The Adams Cantos and the historiography of the American Revolution Speaking in more general terms, Pound’s representation of early American history in the Adams Cantos is characterised by his belief in the essential conservatism of John Adams’s political thought, which allowed him to suggest broad parallels between Adams and his own conception of ‘Confucian’ government. The essentially con­servative nature of the American revolutionary enterprise has been widely argued by historians. Summarising this interpretation of the Revolution and noting its import­ance for Pound’s project in the Adams Cantos, Peter Nicholls comments that: Many historians have stressed the essential conservativism of the American Revolution and while that line of interpretation has not gone unchallenged, it provides the best context in which to examine Pound’s view. Clinton Rossiter, for example, has argued that the Colonists’ way of theorising the central issue of the right to resistance showed a ‘deep-seated conservatism’, and Thad W. Tate, in a discussion of contract theory in America, has spoken of ‘the tendency of the Revolution to eventuate in legalistic institutions rather than in a body of revolutionary dogma’. Pound, I think, grasped the Revolution in precisely this way: it was not ‘a complete smash of the existing order’ like the French Revolution, but a struggle to restore a legitimate order endangered by the imperialistic designs of Britain. (Nicholls 1984, 126)

John Adams was for the American Revolution, in other words, but against revolution in general, and this stance made him especially attractive to Pound. The tradition of conservative revolution he embodies could be read as a struggle to return society to a ‘natural’ order that has been perturbed due to abuses of power; not as a break with the past, but rather as an effort to re-establish society’s connection with a just order from which it has been cut off, either through neglect or through the active interference of self-interested individuals and groups. Drawing on this tradition of American historiography, and adjusting it to suit his own beliefs, Pound could divorce his protagonist’s political gestures from their immediate historical and intellectual contexts and read them instead as assertions of the type of intimate relationship between nature, language and government he had worked to define in his own readings of Confucian philosophy. In ‘A Visiting Card’ Pound makes a distinction between ‘literary’ and ‘legal or scientific word[s]’. The latter, he claims, ‘must, at the outset, be defined with the

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greatest possible precision, and never change [their] meaning’ (SP, 321). This formulation is notable for its refusal to distinguish between scientific and legal definition, suggesting that the latter may be made to reflect empirical realities. It is also important for the relation it suggests between the legal-minded conservatism of Adams’s work to promote the American Revolution and Pound’s own idealist assumptions about government. The only possible revolution, given such an understanding of the law, is one that reaffirms those legal and scientific definitions upon which society is founded. It is in precisely this way that Adams’s work on behalf of the American Revolution is considered in the Adams Cantos. Throughout the sequence, Pound associates his attention to precise legal definitions with a broader respect for the ‘balance’ of natural processes wherein such definitions have their origins. Because Pound conceives of Adams’s writings as a model of such a sensibility, he can advertise them as ‘stones of foundation’ (C, 62/343) on which the American Republic should be based. His work is not to be associated with rebellion on behalf of a progressive political programme. Indeed, it is not to be regarded as politically motivated at all, as Pound makes clear at the opening of Canto LXXI, where he cites Adams’s exclamation: Rebel! I was disgusted at their saying rebel. I wd/ meet rebellion when British governors and generals should begin it, that is, their rebellion against principles of the constitution. (C, 71/414)

What most interests Pound is Adams’s knowledge of ‘the legal or scientific word’, and his ability to define such words with ‘the greatest possible precision’. This attitude leads Pound to avoid offering concrete representations of the type of rigorously constructed legal arguments that he so frequently and enthusiastically praises in abstract terms in the Adams Cantos. The law is not presented as a set of historically contingent conventions that must be continually reinterpreted to take into account the particularities of a given case. Rather, legal practice is presented in terms of an ability to perceive the relation of specific cases to a set of absolute principles. In a long passage from Canto 64, for example, Pound offers examples of Adams’s legal practice to demonstrate his commitment to the patriot cause. In so doing, however, he avoids engaging with the particular details of the cases he evokes: a cargo of wines from Madeira belonging to Mr Hancock without paying customs painful drudgery I had in his cause: as to this statute my client never consented Mr Hancock never consented, never voted for it himself nor for any man to make any such law whenever we leave principles and clear propositions and wander into construction we wander into a wilderness a darkness wherein arbitrary power set on a throne of brass with a sceptre of iron …

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Suspended, in fact, only after Battle of Lexington which ended all such prosecutions Mt Wollanston, seat of our ancestors from East chamber every ship sloop schooner and brigantine Three hundred and fifty were under the Liberty Tree, a young buttonwood, and preparing the next day’s paper, cooking up paragraphs, articles, working the political engine MORNING at Brackett’s upon case of a whale … that I had imported from London the only complete set of British Statutes then in Boston or, I think, in the whole of the Colonies, and in that work a statute whose publication they feared, an express prohibition of empressment expressly IN America which statute they intended to get repealed and did succeed 1769 toward the end of December so doing. (C, 64/358–59)

The ‘painful drudgery’ of Adams’s legal work on Hancock’s behalf stands as a reminder of the protagonist’s determination and industry. Yet no approximation of the arduous courtroom debate that was the cause of such drudgery is attempted by Pound. Instead, a three-line summary of Adams’s argument is given (with no mention of the prosecution’s case), before the terms of Pound’s presentation shift, with the word ‘whenever’, to the abstract. John Adams, following the associations established in the passage, is assumed to possess a knowledge of those ‘principles and clear propositions’ necessary to the just functioning of the state, while his opponents in the case are implicitly associated with chaotic ‘wilderness’, ‘darkness’ and ‘arbitrary power’. In other words, the Hancock case is simplified and recast in abstract terms that transform it into a confrontation between just order and brute force, avoiding engagement either with the specific arguments made against Hancock or with the complicated political context of his trial.6 A few lines later, the statement ‘[s]uspended, in fact, only after the Battle of Lexington’ serves to present this crude summary of Hancock’s trial as exemplary of the buildup to the Revolutionary War, urging the reader to apply the stark binary opposition between ‘clear propositions’ and ‘arbitrary power’ established in Pound’s handling of the Hancock case to its broader historical context. Pound’s desire to ally legal practice with scientific observation and distance it from political posturing ultimately limit his ability to render the complexities of the interchange between law and politics in revolutionary America. This is unfortunate, because historians are in agreement concerning its importance. Peter Charles Hoffer, for example, describes the situation as follows: Invariably, certain kinds of legal cases, particularly those involving collection of fees and fines due to the crown and its agents, became politicized. Politicization

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of legal quarrels in the colonies gave lawyers still more influence in public decision making. The continual blurring of the public and private spheres of law encouraged lawyers to reach into and apply English political theory and jurisprudence to cases and controversies in American courts. Practicing lawyers faced with essentially political quarrels essayed constitutional arguments, tactics that carried law beyond the courtroom into the streets. Battles over the powers of the branches of government originating in legislature led to courtroom tests in a continuing round of highly charged interchanges between law and politics. (Hoffer 1998, 128)

If one is to understand the spirit of these exchanges between politics and the law, it is important that one possess enough information to judge the merits of rival interpretations of English jurisprudence, to gauge the political issues involved in the increasing influence accrued by lawyers in Revolutionary America and to recognise the manner in which legal cases were repeatedly carried ‘beyond the courtroom into the streets’. Yet almost no meaningful information on these subjects may be gleaned from the fragmented surface of the Adams Cantos. While John Adams’s legal activity is advertised as a crucial part of his ‘paideuma’ it is repeatedly presented in terms that expressly avoid engagement with such topics. Instead, Pound works to reduce Adams’s legal thought to moments of visionary perception wherein the gifted lawyer/ statesman recognises the fundamental principles that demonstrate the validity of a given position, and then acts upon this perception with ‘fairness, honesty and straight moving’. Pound’s presentation of such moments is often characterised by a leap from the relatively brief statement of some specific aspect of the issue under consideration to an assertion of abstract and absolute principles that are assumed to dictate the justice of a given course of action. Ironically, Adams’s argument in the Hancock case hinges on the premise that the role of legal and political structures is to maintain a space for representative social debate. Yet Pound’s manner of presenting such structures tends, throughout the sequence, to cast them in an exactly opposite light, basing them instead on principles rooted outside the political sphere. Rather than rendering the sorts of exchanges between law and politics that Hoffer identifies as a crucial feature of Revolutionary America, Pound suggests instead that law provides a means of controlling political debate, bringing it into conformity with a perception of absolute principles. Earlier, in Canto 64, Pound presents the Stamp Act controversy – during which protests against the obligation to affix stamps to legal documents led to the closing of colonial courts – in very similar terms. The passage dealing with this controversy is revealing for what it says about Pound’s poetic method: Stamp Act spread a spirit from Georgia to New Hampshire with honour, more inquisitive as to their liberties even the lowest Your courts are shut down, justice VOID

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I have not drawn a writ since the 1st of November if this authority be once recognized ruins America I must cut down my expenses. For my ruin as well as America’s … To renounce under tree, nay under the very branch where they hang’d him in effigy… UNANIMOUS for Gridley, Jas Otis, J. Adams pray that the Courts may be opened (original of this is preserved) If what I wrote last night recall what Lord Bacon wrote about laws … invisible and correspondences … that parliament hath no authority to impose internal taxes upon us. Common Law. Ist Inst. 142 Coke, to the 3rd Inst. Law is the subject’s birthright (C, 64/356)

This passage, which is based on Adams’s diary in volume two of the Works, flows easily from an identification of the danger posed by the Stamp Act to an assertion, apparently based in legal precedents, of the illegality of that Act. The closing of the courts is described as rendering ‘justice VOID’ and replacing it with an authority which, if ‘once recognized / ruins America’. In opposition to this danger, Adams, Gridley and Otis assert fundamental principles of justice that might be used to resolve the crisis. As it presents their arguments, however, Pound’s poem paradoxically quits the sphere of legal discussion, relying instead on a thematic counterpoint between Adams’s ref­erences to specific instances of positive law and his belief in immutable laws of nature. The reference in this passage to Francis Bacon works to cement this connection, suggesting that the colonists’ argument is supported by ‘laws … invisible and correspondences’. If one turns to John Adams’s diary for 19 December 1765, however, one finds that the actual spirit of his reference to Francis Bacon is very poorly reflected in the text of Canto 64. The relevant passage in the source reads: But when I recollect my own reflections and speculations yesterday, a part of which were committed to writing last night, and may be seen under December 18th, and compare them with the proceedings of Boston yesterday, of which the foregoing letter informed me, I cannot but wonder, and call to mind my Lord Bacon’s observation about secret, invisible laws of nature, and communications and influences between places that are not discoverable by sense. (WJA II, 157)7

In his diary, Adams recalls Bacon’s observation in order to speculate upon the relationship between his own private reflections and the public proceedings taking place in Boston. The reference is something of an aside in its original context. Pound’s

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assumptions about the ‘Adams paideuma’, however, lead him to eagerly seize upon Adams’s passing reflection on Bacon, and he makes several important moves to strengthen the force of this aside, placing it at the very heart of his treatment of the debate surrounding the Stamp Act. One should notice, for instance, that no details regarding the ‘proceedings of Boston yesterday’ are included in Canto 64. Consequently, the speculations that Adams ‘wrote last night’ are no longer presented together with these proceedings as one term in a comparison that recalls Bacon’s writing on ‘correspondences’. Rather, they are made to seem an example of Adams’s struggle to make positive law conform to ‘secret, invisible laws of nature’. By treating them as such, Pound implies a parallel between Adams’s efforts to formulate a valid basis of legal authority in resistance to the Stamp Act and Francis Bacon’s efforts to inductively achieve knowledge of the material world through the careful definition of a range of natural phenomena.8 Pound’s reference to Bacon thus introduces an attention to the ‘inborn qualities of nature’ (C, 256) into the passage, using an assertion of the correlations between such qualities and positive law to turn an aside in a private journal into an authoritative statement on the illegality of the Stamp Act. In the process, Pound almost entirely omits the role public discussion has played in arriving at a resolution to this crisis. The only suggestions of political discussion in this passage are the vague assertion that the ‘Stamp Act spread a spirit from Georgia / to New Hampshire’ and the mention that ‘Gridley, Jas Otis, J. Adams’ have been unanimously chosen by some unspecified body of citizens to ‘pray that the Courts may be opened’ in an unspecified forum. In place of a balanced presentation of such discussion, the passage treats Adams’s personal speculations in such a way as to make them seem to exert a direct influence upon the outcome of the crisis. The private character of ‘what I wrote last night’ is, significantly, ignored in Canto 64, as are such words as ‘reflections’, ‘speculations’ and ‘wonder’ which are not transcribed from the Works, in an effort to maintain the reader’s impression of Adams’s certitude concerning the validity of the authority he identifies. Under the pressure of Pound’s poetic method, the reader is encouraged to imagine ‘what I wrote last night’ not as part of an aside in a private journal, but as a public stance which affirms the presence of an indisputable authority capable of reinstating the justice rendered ‘void’ by the Stamp Act. It is presented as though it were the first term in an if-then clause, asserting the logical necessity of the statement Pound has Adams make about the authority of the British Parliament to tax the American colonies: ‘IF what I wrote last night / recall what Lord Bacon / wrote about laws … invisible and correspondences … / [THEN] that parliament / hath no authority / to impose internal taxes upon us.’ Finally, the immediate juxtaposition of this statement with the citation of references to specific laws (‘Common Law. Ist Inst. 142 / Coke, to the 3rd Inst …’) encourages the reader to believe that there are individual pieces of evidence within the legal code to prove its validity. A final, instructive example of Pound’s attitude towards the law in the Adams Cantos may be found in his description of Adams’s work as a circuit lawyer in Canto 63, which is based on Adams’s Autobiography. Here, the first-person voice of Pound’s protagonist – who, in Canto 62, had so adamantly proclaimed the necessity ‘that law rule’ as part of his defence of Preston and the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre – declares that

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I read Timon of Athens, the manhater must be (IRA must be) aroused ere the mind be at its best la qual manda fuoco dirty and ridiculous litigations been multiplied proverb; as litigious as Braintree (C, 63/353)

The relations established in this passage between fragments drawn from a variety of contexts illustrate some of the more striking ambiguities of Pound’s conception of the law. Crucial to his presentation of Adams’s legal sensibility, here and throughout the sequence, is the idea that the ‘aroused’ mind of his protagonist possesses the capacity to perceive an order that is inherent in the material world. Adams’s attention to precise terminology, in turn, allows him to formulate such perceptions in legal terms, which may then be used to govern the actions of human beings in society. Such passionate perception, permitting the mind to grasp the essence of a thing or situation and define it clearly, is allied in the passage quoted above with a line from Guido Cavalcanti’s ‘Donna mi Pregha’, a poem in which Pound found a similar type of mental activity at work, and which he described elsewhere as ‘a struggle for clear definition’ (LE, 177). The interpolation of the line from Cavalcanti into this passage encourages the reader to believe that Adams’s legal sensibility is in stark opposition to the daily workings of the legal profession in Braintree. John Adams’s ability to clearly define legal terms, a crucial aspect of the ‘Adams paideuma’, is expressly distanced from the drudgery of courtroom debate and litigation. Instead, to quote an observation that Peter Nicholls has made on Pound’s translation of ‘Donna mi Pregha’, it is arrived at by way of [s]udden crystallisations of form and meaning [which sponsor] moments of energy and clarity[, enacting] a process of definition quite opposed to the arid logicality Pound associates with the syllogism… . The poem is crucially important for Pound because Guido’s way of apparently instating will as the ‘peer’ of reason makes ‘natural’ passion and virtù the galvanising force of a perception which reveals latent order and value. (Nicholls 1984, 66)

*** The law occupied a unique place in American society from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, and much in the attitudes towards the subject at that time appealed to Pound. The legal profession attracted many of the country’s most gifted thinkers in these years, acquiring much of the moral and intellectual prestige that had been traditionally held by the clergy.9 It seemed to early American lawyers that law offered a means of ordering the largely undefined (and unexplored) American continent, establishing a structured public space in which an identity for the new nation could be fashioned. Law, for American thinkers of these years, merged neatly with statecraft, functioning as a means by which a grand public design could be

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affirmed through the careful consideration of particular pieces of evidence. The basis for such attitudes may be found in eighteenth-century English legal commentaries, such as William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which the colonists read with great attention. In his study Law and Letters in American Culture, Robert A. Ferguson describes the importance of the law in early American culture as follows: the source of the [early American] lawyer’s epistemological self-confidence [lay in] his peculiar ability to convert general knowledge into design and then into power in places where others found only confusion. [He] valued the aggregation of particulars in [Blackstone’s] Commentaries. [His] discovery of comprehensive brevity and lucid arrangement assumed an accumulation beyond mere linkage. (Ferguson 1984, 31)

The similarities between such methodological assumptions and Pound’s own poetic procedure in The Cantos are striking, and make it easier to understand the excitement he must have felt as he read Adams’s legal arguments. Furthermore, Pound would have been encouraged to find a fundamental agreement between the tradition in which Adams participated and his own Confucianism, since much eighteenth-century legal work was marked by a desire to trace clear connections between natural and positive law. Ferguson notes the importance of such attitudes in a discussion which relates specifically to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, but which has broader relevance for the legal culture of the period: Eighteenth-century conceptions of law encouraged both a particularist methodology for extracting order from chaos and a comprehensive view of subject matter. Jefferson, perhaps the best legal scholar in America in 1781, was thoroughly familiar with the works behind these assumptions. The Dutch jurist, statesman, and poet Hugo Grotius had written in 1625 that human reason, not religious explanation, formed the basis of man’s understanding of natural law. Grotius’ confidence in secular inquiry and his insistence that law be presented in ‘an orderly fashion’ and in ‘a compendious form’ provided the inspiration for Samuel von Pufendorf ’s Of the Law of Nature and Nations (1673), Jean Jacques Burlamaqui’s Principles of Natural and Politic Law (1747–51), Baron de Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws (1748), William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–69), and related works by such figures as Emmerich de Vattel, Lord Kames, and Cesare Beccaria. Jefferson learned from Pufendorf, among others, that it was possible through law ‘to deliver the most comprehensive Definitions of Things’ and to establish in moral science a certainty analogous to that in mathematics. Clear connections between natural law and moral science permitted moral entities to be ‘superadded to natural Things’ through the ‘imposition’ of the reason of ‘understanding Beings’. Burlamaqui outlined just how man-made or positive law logically improved upon natural law and guarded the practical sources of liberty as well as the identity of a culture… Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, in turn, showed how the inexplicable diversity of country or countries could be ordered and then reduced through conceptions of positive law, and Blackstone’s Commentaries represented the great exemplum of that accomplishment – a country completely defined though law. (Ibid., 42)10

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Of interest for an understanding of the Adams Cantos in this description is the similarity between the eighteenth-century notion of law as an instrument that permits ‘the most comprehensive Definitions of Things’ and Pound’s concept of the ‘right naming of things’, which is associated with the chêng ming (正名) characters in the Adams Cantos. Likewise, in Pound’s poem, as in the legal sensibility Ferguson describes, there is an assumption that clear connections can be established between natural things and moral principles. In this way chêng ming (正名) could be understood by Pound as the principle on which just and coherent political action must be based. Thus, in October 1939, he wrote to Fengchi Yang, commenting on Chiang Kai-shek’s resistance against the Japanese invasion of China during World War II: I do not doubt the heroism of Chiang Kai-shek. I am glad to have met you because I wanted to know the point of view from the Chinese interior, BUT 正名 I don’t know if you and the [Secretary] General are aware of the extent to which THE NAMES OF ALL THINGS, all words, have been falsified in the West. The democracies aren’t democracies; they are USUROCRACIES. (EPCF, 23)

It is worth noting as well that the legal sensibility which Pound admires in John Adams has deep roots in pre-Enlightenment sources. Following William Butler Yeats’s remark that Pound’s Confucius ‘should have worn an Eighteenth Century wig and preached in St. Paul’s’ (Yeats 1955, 774), many commentators have associated Pound’s Confucianism with Enlightenment thought.11 In ‘The Jefferson–Adams Letters as a Shrine and a Monument’, Pound indeed establishes connections between Enlightenment rationalism and the thought of Adams and Jefferson. He claims, for example, that: The sanity and civilisation of Adams–Jefferson stems from the Encyclopaedists. You find in their letters a varied culture, and an omniverous (or apparently so) curiosity. (SP, 154)

Yet Pound was also quick to identify aspects of the Enlightenment that he found uncongenial. A few lines after making the connection between the culture of the Encyclopaedists and that of Adams and Jefferson, he nuances the situation by noting that [t]he Encyclopaedists have a rich culture. What is the Dictionnaire de Bayle? As an arrangement it treats topics ALPHABETICALLY. Voltaire’s Dictionnaire is hardly more than a slight addendum. Bayle has Moreri to make fun of, but they all have an ORDER to criticise. They go over the Accepted Aquinian universe with a set of measuring tools, reductio ad absurdum etc. The multifarious nature of cognisance remains, but they have only the Alphabet for a filing system. They are brilliant. Bayle is robust with the heritage of Rabelais and Brantome, Voltaire a bit finer, down almost to a silver point. But the idea and/or habit of gradations of value, and the infinitely more vital custom of digging down into principles gradually fade out of the picture. The degrees of light and motion, the whole metaphoric richness begin to perish. From a musical concept of man they dwindle downward to a mathematical concept. (SP, 154)

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The distinction Pound makes here between the coherently ordered vision of the universe the Encyclopaedists received as part of their cultural heritage and the intellectual brilliance with which they examined and classified individual elements of this universe is important for understanding his approach in the Adams Cantos. Enlightenment rationalism interested him insofar as it attempted to rigorously establish ethical concepts within a coherent system of values. He appreciated its role in defining the field of Adams’s and Jefferson’s ‘omniverous’ study and in sharpening their ‘measuring tools’, but he felt that the coherent vision that made their thought something other than a ‘mathematical’ collection of isolated facts came from elsewhere. If John Adams became such an important figure in The Cantos it was because Pound associated his legal exertions with precisely the sort of ‘digging down into principles’ that he describes as fading out of the Encyclopaedists’ thought. If Pound chose to celebrate Adams’s statesmanship and legal work over an entire ‘decad’ of cantos, it was because he saw these things as part of an effort to establish clear ‘gradations of value’ within an ordered worldview. As such, Pound was less interested in Adams’s affinity with the French Enlightenment of the second half of the eighteenth century than he was in his application of a set of methodological assumptions inherited from earlier thinkers. Robert A. Ferguson, again speaking specifically about Thomas Jefferson, describes these assumptions as follows: ‘A patient pursuit of facts,’ [Jefferson] wrote explaining his procedures, ‘and cautious combination and comparison of them, is the drudgery to which Man is subjected by his Maker, if he wishes to attain sure knowledge.’ Nor should we expect a different methodology from a man whose professed heroes were Bacon, Newton and Locke and whose empiricism, in consequence, assumed that facts properly collected would inevitably lead through inductive reasoning toward unified theory and larger vision. (Ferguson 1984, 37–8)

Such belief in the possibility of arriving inductively at a coherent vision by way of the careful ordering of individual observations is, of course, also typical of Pound’s formal experiments with documentary poetry and of his ideogrammic method. Indeed, Pound had already affirmed an affinity between Francis Bacon and himself in Guide to Kulchur, noting the similarities between Bacon’s criticisms of Aristotle and his own, and remarking that: ‘I don’t think my coincidences of view [with Bacon] are due to unconscious memory, two men at different times may observe that poodle dogs have curly hair without needing to refer to, or derive from, a preceding “authority” ’ (GK, 314). In The New Organon Bacon had argued that his method of inductive reasoning offered a means of arriving progressively at an understanding of natural processes. He stressed that: Man is Nature’s agent and interpreter; he does and understands only as much as he has observed of the order of nature in fact or by inference; he does not and cannot do more… . All man can do to achieve results is to bring natural bodies together and take them apart; Nature does the rest internally. (Bacon 2000, 33)

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In the Adams Cantos Pound identified the methodological assumptions in his protagonist’s legal thought that rhymed with those which Bacon had advanced in The New Organon, and used them to support his own intuition (based in his reading of the Confucian Classics) of the need for positive law to be anchored in careful observation of natural processes.12 This being the case, Pound’s tendency to isolate Adams’s legal work from its social and political contexts is unsurprising. Indeed, one of the more remarkable paradoxes of the Adams Cantos lies in the fact that while these poems reiterate the need to ‘think upon / CONSTITUTIONS’ (C, 68/395), they are actually quite imprecise in their use of this word. Only very rarely is ‘constitution’ used to refer to a specific document or set of political and legal assumptions. In Canto 62, for example, when Adams invokes the authority of a ‘constitution … without appeal to higher powers unwritten’ (C, 62/343) as the basis for his defence of judicial independence in the colonies, he is not referring to a written document at all, but employing the word to refer simply to the existing governmental institutions of England.13 In Canto 63 a vague reference to ‘[o]ur constitution’ (C, 63/353) likewise gestures towards this conception of the term. And throughout the remainder of the sequence such usage of ‘constitution’ recurs regularly. Yet, in the absence of any precise description of how the term is being used, it is all but impossible for the reader to gauge the political and legal assumptions it involves. Such confusion is considerably augmented when one realises that the same term is used elsewhere in the sequence to refer to entirely different political constructions. The Constitution of the United States is referred to at various points in the Adams Cantos, for example, but always with the same absence of historical and legal context that characterises Pound’s references to the English Constitution. Repeatedly, he simply invokes the authority of a ‘constitution’ that is not specifically identified as the American Constitution or distinguished from other documents and traditions he mentions elsewhere in the sequence. At the end of Canto 62, for instance, when he cites John Adams’s opinion that ‘a love of science and letters / a desire to encourage schools and academies / [are the] only means to preserve our Constitution’ (C, 62/349), the reference is indeed to the Constitution of the United States, but no mention has been made previously of the drafting of this document and its contents have not been even cursorily exposed. Consequently the reader can only assume that these lines refer to the recently framed American Constitution if he or she has been paying close attention to the chronological flow of events – a point which is of decidedly secondary importance to Pound’s writing. More important than the specific contents of the document mentioned in this line, or even than the reader’s ability to correctly identify it as the founding document of the United States, is the subject rhyme Pound creates between this ‘Constitution’ and ‘a love of science and letters’; or, even more broadly, the subject rhyme between this entire passage and the insistence, six pages earlier, on the need to consider the ‘constitution … without appeal to higher powers unwritten’ (C, 62/343). The English and American Constitutions, that is to say, are woven into a single thematic complex that reduces the many distinctions between them to a decidedly secondary plane.14 Throughout the sequence, Pound presents Adams’s defence of ‘the constitution’ in terms of a coherent struggle on behalf of absolute principles rather than an

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involvement in political debates that were specific to late eighteenth-century America. Conceiving of the issue in this way, he could establish subject rhymes between Adams’s defence of the English and the American constitutions without seeing the need to rigorously define the set of legal and political assumptions to which he refers in a given line. Instead of making an effort to situate Adams’s study of constitutional law within the context of contemporary political debate, Pound is content to present his protagonist’s defence of the American Constitution as a logical extension of his earlier writing on behalf of the English Constitution. In so doing, he ignores what many later historians have considered to be a crucial shift in the American colonists’ attitude towards statal authority. Bernard Bailyn, for example, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, claims that the War for Independence was ‘above all else an ideological, constitutional [and] political struggle’ (Bailyn 1992, x). What was most essential was a transformation that overtook the inheritance of political and social thought as it had been received in the colonies by the early 1760’s. Indeliberately, halfknowingly, as responses not to desire but to the logic of the situation, the leaders of colonial thought in the years before Independence forced forward alterations in, or challenged, major concepts and assumptions of eighteenth century political theory. They reached – then, before 1776, in the debate on the problem of imperial relations – new territories of thought upon which would be built the commanding structures of the first state constitutions and of the Federal Constitution. (Ibid., xiii–xiv)

Other historians have, of course, criticised the pre-eminent position that Bailyn assigns to constitutional change in his interpretation of the Revolution.15 Yet, even if one assumes that Pound did not share this view of the subject, significant problems with his presentation remain. It seems likely that his understanding of the question was closer to that of a historian like Daniel Boorstin, who insists that: [t]he Revolution … was conceived as essentially affirming the British constitution … [it was] a kind of affirmation of faith in ancient British institutions. In the greater part of the institutional life of the community the Revolution thus required no basic change. (Boorstin 1953, 95, 98)16

Even so, Pound’s agreement with this view of the American Revolution does not resolve the problem created by the lack of historical context he provides for his references to constitutions. The Adams Cantos clearly embrace the notion that the struggle for American independence was essentially a conservative revolution, which sought to maintain liberties the colonists had enjoyed under the British Constitution. They likewise share Boorstin’s emphasis on the English legal tradition as a more fundamental influence on the Revolution than ideas of the European Enlightenment. Yet even to illustrate a historical vision like Boorstin’s, with its emphasis on the continuity between British and American institutions, would require far greater precision on the subject of constitutions. Basic questions concerning the nature of

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the rights protected under the British Constitution and the parliamentary abuses that justified rebellion would need to be answered, as would questions of how the colonists went about framing a written constitution that would preserve the freedoms they had enjoyed under ancient British institutions. Pound’s refusal to even pose such questions in any detail is an indication that he is not interested in reading constitutions as responses to specific historic and political circumstances, as Bailyn and Boorstin do in their different ways. Rather, references to constitutions in the Adams Cantos are consistently associated with the need to establish a legal framework for the state, which can be used to affirm a definite system of values, and which strives to approximate the fixed laws that govern nature. While the historical specificity of references to ‘constitutions’ in the Adams Cantos remains very vague, there is thus a strong thematic consistency in the way the term is employed. In Canto 66, for example, the reader is told of the most accurate judgement about the real constitution which is not of wind and weather what is said there is rather a character than a true ching ming definition. It is a just observation. (C, 66/382)

This is a difficult passage. Some important points are, nevertheless, clear. First, while reference to the Works of John Adams would allow the reader to ascertain that this passage is based on a debate about the true nature of the English Constitution, the canto refuses to make a clear connection between this ‘real constitution’ and any specific document or set of historical assumptions. This being the case, the line ‘what is said there’ stands as a vague gesture towards an entirely undefined space. The reader is given no information that makes it possible to determine either what is said or where this statement is recorded. Beyond this, one may be sure that this ‘real constitution’ is constant, remaining unaffected by the continual changes ‘of wind and weather’. As such, the passage reaffirms the constancy of law which, in Adams’s defence of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, had been introduced as a source of protection against the irrational impulses of human nature. Finally, while the precise referents of the various lines in the passage remain vague, the authority in which this ‘real constitution’ is based is evidently not that of a representative political debate, wherein laws relating to morally ambiguous questions can be decided by elected delegates. Rather, its authority stems from its ability to record a set of ‘true definition[s]’. The establishment of such a ‘real constitution’ depends not upon the consent of a majority of citizens, but rather on the unity of those few individuals capable of arriving at the ‘true definitions’ of which Pound speaks.17 Thus, in Canto 70, Adams is made to remark wistfully:

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how small in any nation the number who comprehend ANY system of constitution or administration and these few do not unite. (C, 70/412)

Such assumptions conditioned Pound’s response to the framing of the American Constitution and made him unwilling to acknowledge either the importance of the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, or the role of political compromises between interested parties in establishing the shape of this document. Debate of this kind, given his assumptions about the basis of statal authority, could only be seen as an attempt to blur public perception of those ‘true definitions’ from which any ‘real constitution’ would have to be fashioned. As such, it seemed not so much a vehicle for arriving at a representative expression of the public will, as a means of furthering the selfish ends of corrupt individuals or parties. While John Adams’s views on such points were far removed from Pound’s own, his stubborn resistance to party politics and his status as the last significant public figure to retain a degree of neutrality with regard to the two major parties at the end of the eighteenth century encouraged Pound to find parallels between his protagonist’s political attitudes and his own assumptions about the basis of governmental authority. When Pound cites a bitter letter in which Adams condemns the political manoeuvres that led to his defeat in the Presidential election of 1800, for example, the lines are made to resonate with a set of assumptions about the nature of government that are fundamental to the Adams Cantos in a much broader way: 73 for Jefferson 73 for Burr a few foreign liars, no Americans in America our federalists no more American than were the antis (C, 70/410)

‘America’, such passages encourage the reader to believe, must not be seen as the continually evolving product of a debate between its two major political factions. Instead, it is apparently based in a set of principles that risk being undermined by such debate. And its Constitution, like the Laws of Charondas that are presented elsewhere in the Adams Cantos, is not valued as the product of national deliberation that Adams himself celebrated, but rather as the ‘true definition’ of an American identity that risks being ‘destroyed … by [the] spirit of party’ (C, 71/417). So, while John Adams endorsed the conception of governmental balance framed in the Constitution as a means of ensuring political stability, Pound was eager instead to consider such ‘balance’ in metaphysical terms. It was important to him that it remain outside the sphere of political debate; rooted in universal principles. Thus, at the end of Canto 70, Pound returns to the division of 73 votes for Jefferson and 73 for Burr in the 1800 presidential election, establishing a counterpoint between this artificial political balance, and the Confucian balance that John Adams embodies:

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I am for balance

and know not how it is but mankind have an aversion to any study of government Thames a mere rivulet in comparison to the Hudson river 73 to Jefferson, to Mr Burr 73 (C, 70/413)

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5

The Adams Cantos and Ezra Pound’s Social Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s The attitudes towards history and the law reflected in the Adams Cantos have deep roots in Pound’s social criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. Donald Gallup’s bibliography records the publication of over 1,000 contributions to periodicals between 1930 and 1945. Since the publication of the final version of Gallup’s bibliography in 1983, hundreds more such contributions have come to light.1 Dozens of articles which Pound worked into final form, but which remained unpublished for one reason or other, may be found in the Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke Library.2 A large amount of this material is now available to readers of Pound. The major event in this process was the landmark publication in 1991 of the eleven-volume facsimile edition of Ezra Pound’s Poetry and Prose, Contributions to Periodicals, containing reproductions of all the items listed in section C of the 1983 edition of Gallup’s bibliography. A selection of the articles which Pound wrote in Italian during these years has been made available in a more accessible form in Idee fondamentali (1991), a collection of Pound’s articles for the Meridiano di Roma edited by Caterina Ricciardi, in Il Mare, Supplemento Letterario 1932–1933 (1999) edited by the Società Letteraria Rapallo, and in Carte Italiane 1930–1944 (2005), a collection of Pound’s literary and art criticism edited by Luca Cesari. An important selection of previously unpublished essays from Pound’s time in Italy was made available in Machine Art & Other Writings, edited by Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Much of this vast body of writing is specifically concerned with social, political and economic questions, and even Pound’s literary criticism of the 1930s and 1940s is very frequently focused through an economic or political lens. The issues with which Pound wrestles in his social criticism of these years also had an important impact on The Cantos.3 While it would be a mistake to read the Adams Cantos simply as an expression of ideas set out in Pound’s social criticism, this body of writing does offer valuable insights into the choices he made as he composed the section. The Cantos had, from the beginning, been a poem with public aspirations. If they were to be successful it was imperative that they be ‘a poem including history’ (LE, 86) so as to recount ‘the tale of the tribe’ (GK, 194). From at least the late 1920s Pound had believed that economics provided the essential facts for understanding history. By the beginning of the 1930s he had begun to seek ways to incorporate his economic thought within a fully developed understanding of the state. In parallel with this evolution in his social and political thought he progressively broadened the field of reference for The Cantos, seeking to place his presentation of economic matters within a context that would make it fully meaningful. The type of economic reform that

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Pound had championed since his meeting with C.H. Douglas and his initiation into theories of Social Credit was, he came increasingly to believe, sterile if such reform was not carried out within a well-organised state.4 By 1939, in ‘What is Money For?’ Pound was complaining that Douglas … didn’t invent and set up machinery for ENFORCING the just price… . Only the STATE can effectively fix the JUST PRICE of any commodity by means of state-controlled pools of raw products and the restoration of guild organisation in industry. (SP, 293)

Since Pound defined money as a measure of value ‘within a system’ (SP, 311), it is hardly surprising that he should have moved over time to pay more and more attention to the governmental system responsible for accurately defining the monetary measure.5 In concordance with this line of thinking, the Middle Cantos register an increasing attention to the shape of those governmental structures that establish the systems wherein money circulates. Tim Redman concisely describes this development in Pound’s thought by noting that: [t]here is … in these middle cantos a growing statal sense, an admiration for those just rulers and statesmen who have exemplified, as Jefferson and John Adams did, an understanding of how a fair economic system is a component of a well-ordered state. These ideas dominate Pound’s poetry of the thirties. In fact, this statal sense is one key difference between early and middle cantos. (Redman 1991, 88)

A full survey of Pound’s vast and multi-layered social criticism of the 1930s and 1940s lies far beyond the scope of this book. Indeed, it is doubtful whether a consideration of the subject could be meaningfully compressed into a single monograph.6 For the purposes of this discussion of the Adams Cantos the emphasis will be placed on three aspects of Pound’s social criticism that converge in his formulation of the ‘Adams paideuma’: his efforts to formulate notions of individual liberty and economic exchange between private individuals in conjunction with a definition of the state’s structure, his theory of language (which moves to the forefront of The Cantos for the first time in the Adams Cantos) and the influence of his study of Confucianism on his understanding of social order.

The ‘individual principle’ and Ezra Pound’s social criticism Pound’s social criticism in the period immediately following the outbreak of World War I was characterised by its resistance to ideologies that had seemingly degenerated into vacuous generalisations, losing contact with the lived experience of individual men and women. In an essay entitled ‘Allen Upward Serious’, published in The New Age in 1914, for example, he celebrated Upward’s warning that

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[w]hen, instead of thinking of men one by one you think of them all at once and call your thought humanity, you have merely added a new word to the dictionary and not a new thing to the contents of the universe. (SP, 409)

A year earlier Pound had co-written a letter to the New Freewoman that claimed the broadly feminist title of that magazine was misleading and should be changed to one which will mark the character of your paper as an organ of individualists of both sexes, and the individualist principle in every department of life. (Levenson 1984, 70)

It would be an exaggeration to claim that the experience of World War I led directly to Pound’s re-evaluation of the importance of this ‘individualist principle’. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the emerging concern with socio-economic issues that characterised his writing in the post-war years led to a gradual shift in emphasis away from the individual and towards a broader concern with the community of which she or he was part.7 Fundamental to Pound’s increasing concern for these matters after 1914 was his conviction that economic liberalism had caused the destruction of essential communal bonds, replacing them with an ethos of strictly materialist competition between avaricious individuals. Pound’s earliest references to the study of economics, notably, treat the subject as something that is uninteresting in itself, but essential to the preservation of the sort of individual freedom that is a necessary prerequisite for artistic creation. In a review of C.H. Douglas’s Credit Power and Democracy, published in 1921, for instance, he writes: Don’t imagine that I think economics interesting – not as a Botticelli or Picasso is interesting. But at present they, as the reality under political camouflage, are interesting as a gun muzzle aimed at one’s own head is ‘interesting’, when one can hardly see the face of the gun holder and is wholly uncertain as to his temperament and intentions. (EPCP IV, 156)

In considering these issues, Pound hoped to unveil this ‘reality under political camouflage’, using the establishment of a just economic system as a means of resolving tensions between the individual and the community that had been created by economic abuses. Reform in this area, and specifically the application of Douglas’s Social Credit theories, seemed to be a crucial step towards the establishment of a civilisation wherein the ‘individualist principle’ could be developed to its fullest possible extent without causing the communal fabric to disintegrate.8 An article entitled ‘Le Major C.H. Douglas et la Situation en Angleterre’, which was published in France in the same year as Pound’s review of Credit Power and Democracy, leaves little doubt that he viewed the matter in this way. The economic structure of the state, according to this article, was to be studied as a means of ensuring the full and unencumbered expression of the ‘individualist principle’ in society. He notes here that:

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To the phrase of our national and international calamity, of Mr. Wilson: ‘To make the world safe for democracy’, Douglas responded: ‘To make democracy safe for the individual’. (Ibid., 168)9

From here Pound goes on to describe Douglas’s ideas as being a response to the ‘complete subjugation of the individual’ in modern capitalist society: Douglas writes on the subject of the German Empire, of its philosophy, its goals: ‘they can be summarised as an effort to entirely subject the individual to a goal which is imposed from the outside and which it is deemed entirely unnecessary, and even undesirable, for him to completely understand.’ That is fine for Germany, but when Douglas applies this proposition to the current state of England, not only to the workers, poor beasts, but to the middle class, the merchants, the businessmen, all those not in the interested centre of finance, there is silence’. (Ibid., 169)10

Pound’s growing concern for social and economic questions was born, then, from a desire to protect the ‘individual principle’ in art and society. He imagined – in a move that was very much within the spirit of the milieu in which he moved during his years in London – the possibility of establishing a complementary relationship between individual and community wherein the free and full expression of the one would support the ideal realisation of the other, without being subsumed by it. John Ruskin, a major influence on much of the writing in The New Age, might be conveniently cited as a predecessor for this line of social criticism.11 In The Stones of Venice Ruskin had found ‘the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture’ in the fact that they receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole. (Ruskin 1981, 120)

Such ideas were still very much alive at the time Pound was making his own assertions about the value of the ‘individualist principle’. D.H. Lawrence, for example, employs almost identical imagery in exploring the relationship between the individual and society in his ‘Study of Thomas Hardy’, adopting Ruskin’s architectural metaphor, and noting the importance of those details that subvert the ‘unaccusable whole’ of Gothic cathedrals. He points out that: There was, however, in the Cathedrals, already the denial of the monism which the Whole uttered. All the little figures, the gargoyles, the imps, the human faces, whilst subordinated within the Great Conclusion of the Whole, still, from their obscurity, jeered their mockery of the Absolute, and declared for multiplicity, polygeny. (Lawrence 1985, 66)

Or, elaborating on this same idea in the ‘Cathedral’ chapter of The Rainbow:

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They knew quite well, these little imps that retorted on man’s own illusion, that the cathedral was not absolute. They winked and leered, giving suggestion of the many things that had been left out of the great concept of the church. ‘However much there is inside here, there’s a good deal they haven’t got in’, the little faces mocked. Apart from the lift and spring of the great impulse towards the altar, these little faces had separate wills, separate motions, separate knowledge, which rippled back in defiance of the tide, and laughed in triumph of their own very littleness. (Lawrence 1989, 189)

Such equilibrium between ‘subordination’ and ‘multiplicity’, however, is difficult to maintain outside of the carefully crafted aesthetic imagery employed by Lawrence and Ruskin in these passages. Pound, too, would struggle with formal and thematic problems related to tensions between the expression of the ‘individualist principle’ and the realisation of a social and artistic ideal. In the Malatesta Cantos, for example, the arrangement of a wide range of material around the stable point provided by the Tempio Malatestiano served as a means of preserving the multiplicity of Sigismondo’s life and times while simultaneously advancing an idealised image of social and aesthetic order. And even as late as 1938, in Guide to Kulchur, Pound would persist in associating these cantos with the individual volition of Sigismondo, claiming that they ‘are openly volitionist, establishing, I think clearly, the effect of the factive personality, Sigismundo, an entire man’ (GK, 194). Increasingly, however, the faith in ‘the individual principle’ upon which he had insisted in his pre-war prose would be reduced to a decidedly secondary place as he moved to speak about ‘humanity’ in terms of ‘an aesthetic [based] in the movement of vast masses of men’ (EPCP VII, 375). He became convinced, in his efforts to shape such an aesthetic, that the idea of ‘good government is perhaps the highest idea that we can ever translate into action’ (EPCP VIII, 15). Inevitably, as he reflected upon the aesthetics of good government and upon the broader natural order in which he imagined such government would be based, his sense of the multiplicity of individual human beings was impoverished in order to facilitate what Lawrence described as ‘the Great Conclusion of the Whole’. An abstract conception of governmental order was elevated to an increasingly central position in Pound’s later writing, while individual liberty was made dependent upon, and subordinate to, this ideal. In an essay entitled ‘On the Degrees of Honesty in Various Occidental Religions’ (1939), for instance, Pound celebrated the papacy as: ‘ideal … equivalent to the ideal of empire. It is a Roman ideal of order and subordination’ (EPCP VII, 467). And in the subsection entitled ‘Fascio’, with which he begins ‘A Visiting Card’ (1942), he insists that ‘LIBERTY [IS] A DUTY’ before offering the following image: A thousand candles together blaze with intense brightness. No one candle’s light damages another’s. So is the liberty of the individual in the ideal and fascist state. (SP, 306)

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The realisation of an ideal governmental order, it is now suggested, constitutes the fullest expression of an entire community’s possibilities, providing, in the process, a context wherein individual potential can be most thoroughly realised. The gesture necessary to arrive at such an ideal, however, is an unabashedly authoritarian one. By the late 1930s Pound was willing to minimise the importance of equality in favour of a social model that defined liberty within the context of a strictly hierarchical order. In an essay entitled ‘The Revolution Betrayed’ (1938), for instance, such a conception is formulated with specific reference to eighteenthcentury American history. Pound writes here that: EQUALITY in Jefferson’s mouth meant that men had the same rights at law … it did not, in Jefferson’s time, mean even universal suffrage. Suffrage could be a reward of merit. It wasn’t defined as strictly as party membership, but it was not cast upon swine unawares… . LIBERTY is impossible without order, and order comes of organisation. (EPCP, VII, 281–2)

The people, according to gestures such as this, are subjected to an ideal ‘order’ which they have no hand in shaping directly. They are transformed into the raw material in which this vision of pre-social order will be affirmed, through a creative act such as the one in which Pound imagines Mussolini, the ‘artifex’, engaging in Jefferson and/or Mussolini.12 He has moved, in fact, from a societal vision which works from the bottom up, ‘thinking of men one by one’ instead of ‘all at once’, as in his social criticism for the New Freewoman, to one that posits an authority that has the capacity, like the one attributed to Zeus in the final lines of the Adams Cantos, to ‘order all things’.13

Pound’s politics of the 1930s and their importance for the Adams Cantos It would be a mistake to believe that the shift in Pound’s social outlook described above simply reflected his desire to advance a Fascist agenda. At the same time, however, it should be noticed that Pound’s struggle to achieve a synthesis between individual freedom and the authority of the state parallels one of the central ideological difficulties faced by Mussolini’s régime. In The Origins and Doctrine of Fascism (1934), for example, the Fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile advanced an idea that conforms in most respects to the terms of Pound’s social criticism of the 1930s and 1940s when he explained that ‘for Fascism … the state and the individual are one and the same thing, or rather are inseparable terms of an essential synthesis’ (Gentile 1973, 307).14 Gentile then went on to frame this belief in terms of the Fascist idea of the corporative state, writing that: Fascism is … creating a corporative syndicalist regime and working to replace the liberal state by the corporative state. Fascism has in fact taken

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over from syndicalism the idea of syndicates as an educative moral force, but since the antithesis between state and syndicate must be overcome, it has endeavoured to develop a system whereby this function should be attributed to syndicates grouped together into corporations subject to state discipline and indeed reflecting within themselves the same organisation as the state. Since the latter wants to make contact with the individual, in order to realize itself as an expression of his will, it does not approach him as the abstract political individual, which old-fashioned liberalism conceived as a purely indifferent atom, but instead approaches him in the only possible way, in his concrete reality as a specialized force of production who, by reason of his speciality, is led to associate himself with all the other individuals in the same category and belonging to the same unitary economic group provided by the nation. By clinging as closely as possible to the concrete reality of the individual as he really is, the syndicate enables him to achieve his proper dignity, either through the self-awareness which he gradually acquires or else by the rights which he is required to exercise regarding the general interests of the nation which will itself arise out of the harmonious whole formed by the syndicates… . The corporative state aims at achieving that immanence of the state within the individual without which there is no strength, which is the very essence of the state and of individual freedom… . (Ibid., 312)

Work and syndical organisation which, in the Marxist critique of liberalism, had been sites of a struggle by labourers to attain political power, are transformed, in Fascist formulations such as this, into arenas wherein a cohesion between the individual and the state could be asserted; the boundaries between public and private spheres are eliminated and the freedom of individual workers is subsumed into the authority of a collectivist state. Benito Mussolini would likewise advertise his support for such critiques of economic liberalism, arguing that: Liberalism denied the state in the name of individual interests; Fascism reasserts the state as the true essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of real men and not of the abstract dummies posited by individualistic Liberalism, then Fascism stands for liberty and for the only form of liberty which can be taken seriously: that of the State and of the individual within the State. (Mussolini 1941, 240)15

The point of departure for such arguments is roughly the same as the one present in Pound’s earliest social criticism. In both cases, one begins with the belief that ‘individualistic Liberalism’ thinks in terms of ‘abstract dummies’ rather than ‘living men’; or, to use the terms Pound employed in his 1914 article on Upward, that ‘instead of thinking of men one by one [it thought] of them all at once and [called its thought] humanity’ (SP, 409). The solution Mussolini offered, like the ones Pound had begun to explore, bound ‘the real essence of the individual’ to the community in an integral relationship that sought above all else to ensure ‘the only liberty worth having,

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the liberty of the state and of the individual within the state’. Following such logic, individual liberty is assumed to necessarily involve subordination to the authority of the state because, as Gentile claims, the authority of the state and the liberty of the citizen form an unbroken and unbreakable circle in which authority presupposes freedom and vice versa. For freedom resides only in the state and the state represents authority; but the state is not an abstraction, an entity descended from heaven, living in the air above the heads of its citizens; on the contrary, it forms one single personality with the individual citizen whom it must thus recognize and help, knowing that it exists in so far as it makes its own existence. (Gentile 1973, 313)

The liberty of the individual is assumed, in other words, to participate in the elaboration of a principle whose truth and vitality ensure both personal and public fulfilment. Rather than imagining, to adopt Lawrence’s imagery, that the ‘great concept’ could never be ‘absolute’; that the ‘separate wills, separate motions [and] separate knowledge’ of individuals would always work, at least partially, ‘apart from the lift and spring of that great impulse towards the altar’, such thinking presupposes the possibility of an organic unity in which public and private identity would be fused in the service of an abstract principle. So, in speaking of the possibility of describing Fascism as a philosophical system, Gentile could argue that [i]f by system or philosophy we mean – as we must mean whenever we intend to talk about something living – a universal principle as it unfolds in action, a principle with the power of revealing its richness, the range of consequences and applications of which it is capable, stage by stage and almost from one day to the next, then Fascism is a perfect system and its development is based on the soundest of principles and most rigorous logic; and, from its Duce down to the humblest foot solider, those who feel within themselves the truth and vitality of this principle are working unceasingly to develop it, sometimes striding steadfastly straight towards the goal, at other times building up and pulling down, advancing and going back to the beginning because the attempt has failed to match the principle and has deviated from its logical development. (Ibid., 305)

The fulfilment of individual potential is made to depend, in other words, upon the realisation of a collective destiny, with the merits of private thought and action being evaluated according to the standards of the principles that direct public policy. The organisation of the entire social body around the principles of ‘truth and vitality’ likewise establishes a basis for the precise definition of ideas within a clearly established political and metaphysical context: Any analysis that does not always presuppose the oneness of things leads not to clarification but to the destruction of the ideas that have had the greatest effect on history: a proof that men cannot be considered in fragments but only as one and indivisible.

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So we have established the first point in defining Fascism: the totalitarian nature of its doctrine which is concerned not only with the political order and management of a nation but with its will, thought and feelings. (Ibid., 301–2)

The similarity between such ideas and Pound’s handling of questions that are not directly related to Italian Fascism is a reminder of the direction his social criticism had taken over the course of the 1920s and 1930s. His description of the root of Confucian ethics in his essay on ‘The Ethics of Mencius’ (1938), for example, strongly echoes the terms of Gentile’s argument, differing significantly only in his tendency to locate the source of the essential ‘oneness of things’ in a metaphysical conception of ‘organic nature’ that the ideal state will presumably mirror, rather than directly in the state itself: The point relevant to my title is that at no point does the Confucio-Mencian ethic or philosophy splinter and split away from organic nature… . The nature of things is good. The way is the process of nature, one, in the sense that the chemist and biologist so find it. Any attempt to deal with it as split, is due to ignorance and a failure in the direction of the will. (SP, 87)

Once such similarities between Pound’s social criticism and the dominant ideology of Italian Fascism in the 1930s have been recognised, it is tempting to posit a neat correlation between Pound’s Fascist politics and his poetry of the 1920s and 1930s. Yet while it is true that the Adams Cantos were written at the height of Pound’s commitment to Italian Fascism and that they echo certain assumptions he developed in connection with these political beliefs, it would be a mistake to describe them as simply a piece of régime art. Pound’s Fascism, as critics have been more and more ready to recognise over the past two decades, was as much a product of political and economic ideas he gathered from an eclectic range of traditions ideologically distant from Mussolini’s régime as it was a reflection of actual convergences between Mussolini’s political and economic ideas and his own.16 It is also important to remember that Pound’s thought about government was broadly characterised by his willingness to consider the specificities of a given country’s institutional framework as being relatively unimportant in comparison to a more broadly conceived struggle to bring statal authority into conformity with permanent principles of justice rooted in ‘natural’ order. Thus, in the closing lines of Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound defends Mussolini’s régime by stating that: As for a spread of fascism, if it could mean a transportation of the interesting element of the decade, it would not need parades, nor hysterical Hitlerian yawping. The would-be fascists would have to make a dispassionate analysis of fascism on the hoof, the rivoluzione continua as it has been for over a decade, its main trend, its meaning; and they would profit by such study in considering what elements can be used in either England or America, the general sanity and not the local accidentals, not the advisabilities of a particular time and place but the permanent elements of sane and responsible government.

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Towards which I assert again my own firm belief that the Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with the lovers of ORDER tὸ calόn (J/M, 127–8)



The ‘main trend’ or ‘meaning’ of Fascism, Pound implies here, cannot be fully grasped by analysing specific measures Mussolini has taken to address the contemporary situation in his country. What is demanded is not an understanding of the machinery of government, but rather an ability to perceive the ‘order’ that is assumed to underlie governmental actions. Mussolini’s essential quality, according to the terms of this argument, is not an ability to manage the ‘accidentals’ of governmental administration, but rather a visionary capacity, which permits him to perceive and act upon ‘permanent elements of sane and responsible government’; grasping their relation to an objective, definable ‘order’.17 Like John Adams, he is understood to be as much an artist as a statesman, and is celebrated as such. The impulse by which he governs is of an essentially aesthetic nature, as Pound makes clear when he concludes his description of Italian Fascism with the statement that the order this government affirms must be associated with ‘tὸ calόn’, the beautiful.

Pound’s theory of language and its relation to his social criticism Already, in ‘I Gather the Limbs of Osiris’ (1911), where he posits the existence of ‘luminous details’ that might ‘govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit’ (SP, 22–3), Pound had begun to experiment with the idea that the ‘vision’ of exceptional individuals could be used to control the flow of knowledge within a broadly defined civilisational whole. His use of this idea, in this early series of articles, was confined strictly to an analysis of literature, but it is nevertheless instructive for what it says both about his conception of the artist and about the artist’s relation to a wider public. Pound writes here that: As for myself, I have tried to clear up a certain messy place in the history of literature; I have tried to make our sentiment of it more accurate. Accuracy of sentiment here will make more accurate the sentiment of the growth of literature as a whole, and of the Art of poetry… . The artist seeks out the luminous detail and presents it. He does not comment. His work remains the permanent basis of psychology and metaphysics. (SP, 23)

This concept would seem, by its nature, to involve the subjective impressions of the individual poet. Yet Pound’s argument nevertheless moves to affirm its usefulness in making objectively ‘accurate’ claims about ‘the history of literature’. The methodological difficulty with regard to his concept of the ‘luminous detail’ resides in his

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refusal to either use it strictly as a means of subjective expression or to recognise that, if such details are to have any value as a means of presenting the ‘development of literature and civilisation’, they must enter into dialogic relationships with other terms that have been developed through public debate, gradually achieving some degree of consensus. By suggesting that these details possess an absolute value which the poet is uniquely equipped to perceive and that, once presented, they can ‘govern knowledge’ independently of pre-existing conceptual frameworks, Pound moves to substitute the authority of the individual artist’s vision for a process of open critical debate. These assumptions would be pursued with increased rigour in his later formulation of the ‘ideogrammic method’. The development of this method and its role in Pound’s poem has been widely discussed.18 For the purposes of the present discussion, two of the ideogrammic method’s presuppositions are of crucial importance. First, it assumed that complexes of meaning, be they as small as an individual Chinese character or as large as an entire civilisational ‘paideuma’, constituted unified, organic wholes that could be understood in a synthetic manner. Second, it assumed that an individual engaging in productive ‘ideogrammic’ thinking possessed the capacity to perceive the essential qualities of such complexes, reducing them to their most concrete elements, whose reality, once recognised, would be beyond dispute.19 Pound’s manner of interpreting individual Chinese characters serves as an obvious and highly instructive example of these assumptions. In attempting to define the meanings of these characters, his impulse was consistently the same: to isolate them from the textual and historical currents in which they were embedded and to reduce them to their most apparently concrete level. He focused upon those visual components of the characters that he believed to be approximations of material things, and especially of things associated with either natural phenomena or primitive human society. Thus, for example, he glossed the ling2 character (靈) in Canto 54 as representing ‘under the cloud / the three voices’ (C, 54/754), while he read the tan4 character (旦), meaning ‘dawn’, by suggesting that it portrays the sun above the horizon. In his copy of Morrison’s Chinese Dictionary he noted ‘magnificent ideogram – phanopeia’ beside this character (Kenner 1971, 103). Nor are such attitudes confined to his reading of individual Chinese characters. They are, in fact, symptomatic of a general attitude towards language that directly informs much of the later poetry of The Cantos. Pound’s attempt to reduce the Chinese written language to concrete components which are assumed to reflect material things is only the most obvious example of his broader desire to reconcile language with natural process. Language, he attempts to affirm through the example of Chinese characters, is not so much a product of social relations as it is transcendental in its origins. In its most perfect form it is actually a medium that objectively reflects the natural world, rather than one that originates over time through a variety of culturally specific attempts to interpret nature. These ideas allow Pound to imagine the possibility of establishing an empirical basis for language, rather than accepting it as ‘mere epistemology’ (C, 87/587), an attitude that is of basic importance to his Confucianism. As described by Feng Lan, Pound used Confucian teachings to relate

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a dynamic process whereby the individual mind is able to complete the knowledge of reality. What characterizes Pound’s postulate is a conviction that such a process is sustained by the generative power of language rather than by a mystic force. In his reinterpretations of Confucian teachings centred on the concept of chêng [sincerity], we come to see how Pound envisions the role of precise language in relation to three aspects of cognition: reconciling the human mind and the transcendental mind, prescribing the procedure of self-actualization, and clarifying the truth of things obtained from observation of nature. Underlying Pound’s campaign for a ‘clean up of the Word’ is the presupposition that there exists a language of transcendental origin whose perennial efficacy contrasts sharply with the deterioration of human language. (Lan 2005, 71)20

By the time Pound composed the Adams Cantos he had already begun to consider the concept of chêng (誠, sincerity) as expressing a bond between organic nature and verbal expression. He understood the term both in the traditional sense of being free from deceit, hypocrisy or falseness (the qualities of ‘honesty and straight-moving’ [C, 62/350] he praised in Adams, for example, or the faithfulness to the historical record he promises in the opening lines of Canto 62) and a far broader idea of proximity to natural process. Pound had already explored this latter definition of the word in the discussion of ‘terminology’ which he included as part of his translation of the Ta Hsio in 1928. Here, chêng had been described as: ‘Sincerity.’ The precise definition of the word, pictorially the sun’s lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally. The righthand half of this compound means: to perfect, bring to focus. (Con, 20)

In The Unwobbling Pivot (1947) the relation between sincerity, natural process and language would be elaborated and its role in shaping a human society based on natural ‘balance’ stated in explicit terms. Pound postulates here that: He who defines his words with precision will perfect himself and the process of this perfecting is in the process [that is, in the process par excellence defined in the first chapter, the total process of nature]… . Sincerity is the goal of things and their origin, without this sincerity nothing is… . He who possesses this sincerity does not lull himself to somnolence perfecting himself with egocentric aim, but he has a further efficiency in perfecting something outside himself… . The inborn nature begets this activity naturally, this looking straight into oneself and thence acting. These two activities constitute the process which unites outer and inner, object and subject, and thence constitutes a harmony with the seasons of earth and heaven. (Ibid., 177–9)

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This passage helps to better understand the major Chinese characters that recur in the Adams Cantos. John Adams’s commitment to ‘balance’ (中, chung) describes his effort to bring himself into harmony ‘with the seasons of earth and heaven’; a harmony which informs his ability to ‘define words with precision’ (正名, chêng ming). Pound’s fullest explication of the chêng ming characters, however, came in an unpublished Italian essay, entitled ‘Confucio Totalitario’, which he most likely wrote in 1943, but which was never published. A relatively clean typescript is conserved with the Ezra Pound Papers at the Beinecke Library (EPP, Beinecke, 94, 3953). This essay (which is reproduced in its entirety in Appendix D) is of basic importance for understanding the connections Pound was seeking to establish in these years between the interpretation of individual Chinese characters and a broader understanding of social order. It also represents one of the fullest expressions of the comparison he was seeking to make at the time between Confucianism and Neoplatonism.21 The two parts of the chêng ming (正名) compound, according to Pound in this essay, may be interpreted as follows:

To fix the word, to define the word. The upper half of the ideogram derives from

two poles planted in the ground, the end, the limit, the resting point. If we add another line that would put on the cover, it would then represent the sky, the other limit of thought: which we find, I think, in the ideogram of the King



The mediator between earth and heaven.

At the bottom of the ideogram we find the mouth, the sound, and above it the waning moon; [a component of] the vague sound that disappears, the word that changes its meaning, the name which does not last. (EPP, Beinecke, 94, 3953, p. 2)22

Pound’s description of the two parts of this compound is remarkably similar to his discussion of ‘the problem of the word’ in ‘A Visiting Card’ (1942), which, he claimed:

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consists of at least two parts:

(1) the word of literary art which presents, defines, suggests the visual image: the word which must rise afresh in each work of art and come down with renewed light; (2) the legal or scientific word which must, at the outset, be defined with the greatest possible precision, and never change its meaning. (SP, 321)

The task of arriving at the precise legal terminology that forms the basis for good government thus depends upon ‘fixing’ the written word, to a ‘point of rest’ which is arrived at by achieving identity between the word and the ‘underlying fact’ it is meant to describe.23 It is this belief in the capacity of words to reiterate the essential value of natural things that Pound signals with his use of the chêng ming characters. Given this attitude, it becomes much less important to locate terms within a larger, historically specific discursive field. Their definitions depend not upon such contexts, so much as upon the point of rest which fixes them to natural phenomena. And, as examples of such linguistic precision are multiplied, Pound is confident that an order inherent in nature will be affirmed. While always imaginative and occasionally enlightening, this approach creates serious problems, even insofar as it relates to individual Chinese characters. As Michael Bernstein points out, for example: Pound’s sources defining the ideogram all agree that the terms of the pictorial relationships are certified by the entire culture which employs them. It is the community of written-speech users throughout the culture’s linguistic history that has shaped the ideogram’s configuration and validated its accuracy. The justice of any ideogrammic juxtaposition is determined by the linguistic competence of the whole tribe, and, as is true of the fixed epithets of oral epics, any particular use of that form depends upon a long history of tribal selection and confirmation. In the case of Pound’s new ideograms (his juxtapositions and combinations), there is no voice but his own to give them authority. (Bernstein 1980, 47)

If such criticism is damaging when applied to Pound’s handling of individual Chinese characters, it is doubly so with regard to his use of the ideogrammic method as a means of understanding history. It was Pound’s hope that this technique would offer a means of combining close attention to particular facts with a broader poetic exposition of social and historical developments. Its actual implications, however, are quite different. Burton Hatlen succinctly describes the difficulty Pound encountered in employing the method when he notices that: [Pound] thought he had found a new way of bringing these two [the concrete and abstract] dimensions of our world together: in the ideogram, concrete particulars could come together to ‘configure’ an idea. In effect, the ideogrammic method rules out any possibility that ‘meaning’ or ‘truth’ might exist beyond the particulars, in a Platonic realm of ‘ideas’ toward which the particulars will, analogically, point. (Hatlen 1985, 159)

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This tension between the concrete and the abstract can, in fact, only be overcome by affirming the objective worth of what is in fact a personal and aesthetic judgement concerning the relationship between the particular elements assembled in an ‘ideogrammic’ compound. While ostensibly placing the reader in a position to make her or his own judgements on such points, Pound’s method actually presupposes the existence of a pre-defined order whose presence will be confirmed as an increasing amount of data is presented. To again quote Bernstein: the appeal of the ideogrammic method as a technique for structuring an enormous amount of historical data arises because, like Agassiz’ and Frobenius’ inductive procedures, it lets the poet present single details which, by being combined, will naturally suggest a particular argument or interpretation, thereby establishing the text’s governing fiction: it is up to the reader to ‘draw his own conclusions.’ (Bernstein 1980, 38)

A letter which Pound wrote to the philosopher George Santayana, shortly after completing work on Cantos LII–LXXI, illustrates these methodological difficulties with his ‘ideogrammic’ thinking. ‘Premature to mention my “philosophy”,’ he tells his correspondent, ‘call it a disposition’: In another 30 years I may put the bits together, but probably won’t… . One ideogrammic current is from picture often of process, then it is tied to, associated with one of a dozen meanings by convention. Whole process of primitive association, but quite arbitrary, as: two men, city, night=theft.– – – – Not the picturesque element I was trying to emphasize so much as the pt. re western man ‘defining’ by receding: red, color, vibration, mode of being, etc.; Chinese by putting together concrete objects as in F[enellosa]’s example: red cherry iron rust flamingo Am not sure the lexicographers back him up. Sorry you had those grubby pages. A few nice ideograms would have reconciled your aesthetic perceptions. Have I indicated my letch toward teXne, and do I manage to indicate what I conceive as kindred tendency? From the thing to the grouped things, thence to a more real knowledge than in our friend Erigena… – nice mind, but mucking about in the unknown. Damn all these citations of Hebrew impertinence or whatever. Erig. had a nice mind, full of light and had perceived quite a lot. It’s the fussing with nomenclature by absolutely ignorant arguers that gets my goat. (SL, 333)

It is clear from this letter that Pound’s theory of the ideogram relies on the belief that Chinese written language is indissolubly bound to ‘concrete objects’. As such, it offers a counter-example to what he sees as the Western tendency to define by ‘receding’ into abstraction – a process that inevitably results in ‘mucking about in the unknown’. He is quick to recognise that Chinese often constructs meanings by ‘convention’ or ‘quite arbitrary’ ‘primitive association’, but his firm belief that ‘concrete objects’ form the most basic components from which such meanings are built remains unshaken.

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For Pound, Chinese written characters offered an especially useful poetic tool because they seemed to visually display the fact that language was underwritten by things that exist outside the linguistic sphere. Thus, they illustrated a means of escaping the arbitrary nature of language; or, to use the terms of Saussurean linguistics, the linguistic sign’s nature as ‘a two-sided psychological entity’ (Saussure 1983, 66).24 By minimising the importance of the process of conceptualisation that necessarily separates the natural thing from the graphic element of Chinese characters, Pound convinced himself that they offered an essentially empirical language; one capable of directly translating experience of the material world onto the written page. The intelligence of the perceptive observer might thus pierce directly through the linguistic signifier and make contact with the thing it represents – making possible statements that are verifiably true, rather than simply being valid or relevant within a given discursive context. Pound’s favourite example of this was Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s ability to perceive that the Chinese character ma (馬) meant ‘horse’, without any previous knowledge of the language.25 This aestheticisation of the Chinese language explains why Pound is so unconcerned when he admits to Santayana, in the letter quoted above, that he is ‘not sure if the lexicographers back [Fenellosa] up’. Fenellosa’s knowledge of the actual history of the Chinese language, as far as Pound is concerned, is of secondary importance. What is crucial is his ability to recognise the ‘concrete objects’ that stand at the ‘root’ of the characters and make possible an approach to ‘real knowledge’. Revealingly, in defending Fenellosa against ‘the lexicographers’, Pound advances an aesthetic argument, telling Santayana: ‘sorry you had those grubby pages. A few nice ideograms would have reconciled your aesthetic perceptions.’ Santayana objected to the ideogrammic method on philosophical grounds. How, he wanted to know, was one to determine which facts or components were to be grouped together? When you ask for jumps [between ‘things’ or ‘particulars’ to be combined ‘ideogrammically’] … you don’t mean (I suppose) [jumps to] any other particulars, although your tendency to jump is so irresistible that the bond between the particulars jumped to is not always apparent? It is a mental grab-bag. A latent classification, or a latent genetic connection would seem to be required, if utter miscellaneousness is to be avoided. (Stock 1970, 373–4)

The ‘ideogrammic method’, that is, can claim to eliminate abstraction only if it ignores the initial abstraction involved in determining what ‘things’ are relevant to a given presentation. Pound’s response to such criticism was not based in logical argument, but in faith. He was willing to believe, first, in the presence of an essential bond between language and a coherent natural order, and, second, in the visionary capacity of exceptional individuals to perceive the nature of this bond and to accurately describe the ‘true’ qualities of the material world. Such faith in the capacity of the individual mind to use the generative power of language to arrive at a complete knowledge of natural process stands at the basis of Pound’s Confucianism, and informs his use of the chêng ming characters in the Adams Cantos.26 Reality-formation, according to such ideas,

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is not a relative process, whereby a range of competing interpretations of the world are brought into dialogue with one another. Rather, it comes to be seen as a struggle to grasp, through the accretion of objectively verifiable facts, an order that pre-exists interpretative activity. This being the case, Pound can even concede to Santayana that the ideogrammic method depends on the ‘latent classifications’ imposed by the individual thinker who employs it. Those things that are honestly perceived according to the terms of this method, at least, are assumed to possess a solidity that syllogistic arguments do not, serving as the points from which ‘real knowledge’ of the world can begin. What is ultimately objectionable about Pound’s use of the ‘ideogrammic method’ is his belief that it provided a means of more accurately understanding the truth about history and society. As a poetic device, it offers a fascinating means of presenting the interaction between an individual subject and the material world in which he or she lives. It makes it possible to chart points of intersection between the self and its environment, permitting an exploration of the ways in which the sense of individual identity is tied up in the circulation of objects in the material world; subjected to the rhythms of social and natural phenomena which it can only hope to imperfectly understand or control. In the Adams Cantos, Pound’s ‘ideogrammic’ treatment of the Works of John Adams made possible a stimulating and energetic enactment of the manner in which an individual struggles to make sense of the historical record. The poetry produced by this method, however, as Santayana perceived, must inevitably reflect the latent classifications that inform the selection of those particular ‘things’ that will be grouped together ideogrammically. It thus says as much about the character of that individual mind as it does about the essential facts of the subject presented. Within the context of The Cantos, the ideogrammic method of poetry poses far fewer problems in the Pisan Cantos, where it is used to depict Pound’s private drama at the Disciplinary Training Center, than it does in the Adams Cantos, where it is used to offer a synthetic vision of the fundamental facts of late eighteenthcentury American history.

Pound’s Confucianism and the science of government in the Adams Cantos John Adams first captured Pound’s attention as a potentially new element in the thematic progression of The Cantos because his attitude towards the role of language in government seemed to rhyme with Pound’s own developing Confucianism. As he reflected on the subject over the course of the 1930s, Adams’s importance to The Cantos came to seem increasingly evident. While it is broadly true that Pound’s attention shifted away from Thomas Jefferson in favour of John Adams over the course of the 1930s, it should not be forgotten that the two men had had different significance for him from the very beginning of the decade.27 While the relationship between language and government had not been a major subject in either Cantos 31–34 or Jefferson and/or Mussolini, Pound had already begun to reflect on the question at the

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Ezra Pound’s Adams Cantos

time of his first meaningful encounter with John Adams. In ‘How to Read’ (1929) he commented, for example, that the individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati. (LE, 21)

Such concern with law – and, through law, with the capacity of language to establish the framework of the state – was a relatively new aspect of Pound’s thought at this time. His newfound interest in the subject, as Tim Redman points out marks an important turning point [in his writing]. He had previously felt some obligation to justify his activity as an artist, but only in terms that provided a clear space in which to pursue his work. Now he felt a need to explain how the writer contributes to the functioning of the state. (Redman 1991, 84)

This ‘turning point’ reflects Pound’s interest in Confucianism, and if Pound was so quickly drawn to John Adams when he read the Works for the first time in 1931, it was largely because he sensed that Adams offered a means of relating Confucian attention to precise terminology to the American scene. A significant number of Pound’s reading notes from the Bibliothèque Nationale pick up on this theme, and over the course of the 1930s he worked to shape his thoughts on the subject into a coherent position that could be clearly presented in The Cantos. A number of rough notes in a folder labelled ‘Notes for Cantos [XXXI–LI]’ in the Pound collection at the Beinecke Library show him wrestling with these questions (EPP, Beinecke, 72, 3246). On one undated autograph page in this folder, for example, he struggles to define the ‘function of literature in the state’: Func[tion] of Lit[erature] in state = propaganda?? = keep clean the tools. to order laws muddle commands