The Cantos: Slow Reading

Author(s): Margaret Dickie

Source: ELH, Vol. 51, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 819-835
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872785 .
Accessed: 04/06/2011 12:23

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
ELH.

http://www.jstor.org
THE CANTOS: SLOW READING

BY MARGARET DICKIE

Philology-Roman Jakobson,quoting Nietzsche, used to tell his

students-is the art of slow reading. It checks the eye's trained
impulse to move quicklyfromone word to the nextby encouraging
an appreciation of each word in itself,a curiosityabout originsand
historyof meanings, and a full sense of the mysteryof exact defi-
nition. As an art, slow reading is something differentfrom the
retarded pace necessary to decipher an obfuscated text or slack
writing,although it shares with that task an analyticalinclination.
But philology is analysis in the interestof revealing complexities,
and thus it is closer to the creative act itself,that point at which
the writersortsthroughhis words. It is what Emerson had in mind
when he claimed that there was a creative reading as well as a
creativewriting.And a poet, trained as a philologist,mightreadily
use as a model of writinghis own reading habits since the two
activitieswould not be so far separated in his mind.
Philologyas a subject of The Cantos has long been appreciated,
but it has been less fullydiscussed as an art into which we are
being instructedand as a model forwriting.Yet The Cantos is a
teacher's text and a philologist's notebook as well as a poem re-
vealing Ezra Pound's own reading habits. He wrote as he read,
read as he wrote, both transcribinginto writinghis own responses
as a reader and reading in order to write. To read by imitating
Pound himselfwill thus thwartthe desire to make the poem add
up to something quickly, to fill in the gaps, and to restore the
context,a desire irresistiblewhen the poem is read with the speed
ofconventionalreading habits. By contrast,learningthe artofslow
reading and applying it to The Cantos will respect the progress of
the poem thatleaves everythingopen, fragmented,and discontin-
uous, somewhat in the way thatthe process ofreading and writing
does.
I speak of the art of slow reading as if it were possible to read
The Cantos in any other way. The devices by which Pound
impedes reading-rapid switches in language and contexts,exclu-
sive privatemusings,obscure references,multipleallusions-have

819
requiredand been wellservicedbyannotatedindexeswhich,fre-
quentlyconsulted,willinevitably slowdownthereading,butnot
tothelevelofan art.Philology as an artdependson theknowledge
ofindexes,butit dependsalso on an imaginative apprehension, a
fulland analytical
appreciation oftheformsit uses, and finallyon
all thesestatesofawarenessat once. Like theballerinawhowill
rememberthe seriesofexercisesnecessaryto makethefullleap
but suggestratherthanawkwardly revealthemin publicperfor-
mance,so thephilologist-poet willbe able to recalltheroutesby
whichhe has soughtout roots,drawingour attentionto them
withoutnecessarily layingout all the proof.The philologist's
art
appreciatesthe partin the whole,just as the artistwill see the
geniusof a singlestrokewherethe untrainedviewermightsee
onlythe fullform.So philologyplaces a highvalue on analysis,
delightingin dissection,
holdingoffas longas possibletheappre-
hensionofthewhole.
Pound'suse ofphilology as a modelforwriting madeitpossible
to transcribe
hisprivatepondering intopublicprint.He canwrite
as a translatorreads in two languages at once, forexample: "Cypri
munimenta sortitaest, mirthful,orichalchi, with golden / Girdles,
and breast bands. "' Or he can translate and then reproduce the
original, as in "Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil"
(4.15). He is able to address the author and text before him as in
the opening of Canto 2, "Hang it all, Robert Browning, / there
can be but the one 'Sordello, ' " (2.6) or the reader of his own text,
as in "Lie quiet Divus. I mean, that is Andreas Divus" (1.5). His
readers may read over his shoulder, followingas he points out the
words, learning fromPound's disarminglycandid style of instruc-
tion a new way to read.
These readerly habits remained constant throughout the long
stretch of his career, but his skills and interests changed. He
startedout brashly,confidentthathis artwould sustain his insights,
that he could show offhis philological talents and win readers to
his revolutionarystyle. At Pisa, his public stature and private sta-
bilitywobbling and most of his books taken away, he did not give
up the art of slow reading, but he had to practice it without the
texts. He sorted through his memories and the natural scene be-
fore him tryingto put what remained into a text that he might
read, at points trying to fill in the gaps just as earlier he had
searched forwords to fillin fragmenteddocuments. Here the task
became constructive, if uncertain, and Pound's earlier assurance

820 The Cantos: Slow Reading

gave way to the tentativeand questioning attitudeof despair. But
eventually even at Pisa, he found a means to restore the text, to
write a poem. Finally, at the end of his lifetimeof reading as his
mind and his poem slipped away from him, the habits of slow
reading and its rewards remained. Even when he had forgotten
the contextsand despaired of his project, he could stillrecall with
great claritythe events and habits of thinkingthathe had enjoyed
in his 'green time.
As a young poet fresh fromhis graduate trainingin philology,
Pound was confidentof success and interestedin teaching a whole
generation how to read. He records with admiration his visit to
the German philologist,Emil Levy, to whom he had been sent by
his professorof Romance languages at the Universityof Pennsyl-
vania. Pound reports that he asked, cc'Yes, Doctor, what do they
mean by noigandres?' " And Levy replied, " 'You know for seex
mon's of my life / Efferynightwhen I go to bett, I say to myself:
/ Noigandres, eh noigandres, / Now what the DEFFIL can that
mean!' " (20.89-90). In Levy's own style, Pound opens Canto 8,
the firstof fourcantos dealing with Malatesta:
Thesefragments youhaveshelved(shored).
"Slut!""Bitch!"Truthand Calliope
Slangingeach othersousles lauriers:
That Alessandro was negroid.AndMalatesta
Sigismund:
Frater tamquam
Et compatercarissime:tergo
. . hanni de
dicis
... entia
Equivalentto:
GiohannioftheMedici,
Florence
Letterreceived.
(8.28)
Unlike Levy, who has only one word, Pound has a whole era of
which to inquire, " 'Now what the DEFFIL can that mean!' " He
begins by rejecting a rival's judgment, although the Eliotic men
offailed will portrayedat the end of Canto 7 mighthave suggested
that Pound shared Eliot's views. Here, he sets Eliot's assessment
aside, but only to be reminded of the endless wrangle between
truthand poetry.Then, by way of interruption,Pound recalls that
"That Alessandro was negroid," and realizes that he cannot call

Margaret Dickie 821

him "biondo," as he had done in the preceding canto. He corrects
his mistake by making a mental note of it, an intrusion in this
present canto which has an entirely differentsubject. Then he
turns to the firstdocument, reproducing it as he finds it.
These opening lines provide the context of Pound's reading as
well as the content, just as Levy had set his philological inquiry
in the routine of his life, going to bed every night for six months
puzzled by a single word. It tells us something of the philologist's
devotion to his art, but even more it reveals how the philologist
arrives at his understanding slowly and by a careful process of
reflection, allowing free play to the associational processes of the
mind. Pound writes his poem in the fullawareness ofother poems,
of other disagreements, of mistakes he has already made, and fi-
nally of a certain skill with translation.
In The Poetics of Indeterminacy, Marjorie Perloffsuggests that
Pound's method was designed, like the collage, to release words
from the determinacy of a specific reference, and the lines here
may appear to resemble a collage in effect.But the discontinuities
seem to be the result of an analytical process rather than the con-
glomerativeaim of the collage. There are underneath Pound's texts
other texts to which his refer and without which his would make
no sense.
Yet, if the referentialityis pursued with relentless rigor in this
passage, Pound is also exhibiting the variety of his talents with
words. He cites The Waste Land, but only to renegotiate his re-
lationship with it. He shows offhis newly acquired skill in abrupt
changes of decorum. And he demonstrates how to fill in blanks
and find the equivalent of a fragmented manuscript passage, but
again by a sleight-of-handtrick. As a construction and an intro-
duction to this important character and example of "intelligent
constructivity,"as Pound called Malatesta, these thirteen lines
seem perversely unsuitable, moving as they do in increasingly
disintegrative stages. They defy the eye's willingness to go in a
continuous movement from left to right, line by line. But this
impediment may have been what Pound needed to satisfythe
ideogramic aim of "presenting one facet and then another until at
some point one gets offthe dead and desensitized surface of the
reader's mind, onto a part that will register."32
The desire to make his readers register his meaning Pound
shares with every poet; but his method of attractingtheir attention
is his own. It revolves around the philologist's interest in frag-

822 The Cantos: Slow Reading

ments-the fragmentsof documents he has fromwhich to recon-
structMalatesta's life, his own imitativefragmentarystyle, and his
view of the poem as a fragmentbetween its beginning in other
writingand its end in other readings. Although he announces his
interest in the opening line, it is not until the transcriptionof a
letter in Latin that Pound demonstrates fully the problems that
the documents present and the skill with which he can handle
them. His is a much simpler philological task than Levy's search
forthe definitionof "noigandres," but he uses it as an elementary
lesson in the difficultiesof reading documents and the pleasures
of solving the problems, pleasures in which the confused reader
is ready to participate once he or she can read back from"Letter
received" to "Frater tamquam."
The fragmentation of Pound's own style demands a reader
willing to give it the attention usually reserved for partially de-
stroyed Renaissance documents, and certainly by this means
Pound is tryingto create an ideal reader for himself. Yet such
methods risk alienating readers, even serious readers such as
Donald Davie, who claims to be no wiser on the subject of Mal-
atesta afterreading these cantos. Davie says, "Indeed, 'reading' is
an unsatisfactory word forwhat the eye does as it resentfullylabors
over and among these blocks of dusty historical debris. We get
lost in ever murkierchaos, an ever more tangled web of alliances,
counteralliances, betrayals, changing of sides, sieges and the
raising of sieges, marches and countermarches; it is impossible to
remember whose side Malatesta is on at any time or why."3
Yet Davie's astute, if labored, response resembles Pound's own,
as he explains it to John Quinn:

Authoritiesdifferas to whetherSigismundMalatestarapeda
germangirlin Verona,withsuchvigourthatshe "passedon," or
whetherit was an italianin Pesaro,and the pope sayshe killed
her firstand raped afterwards;also some authorities
say it was
Farnese and not Malatesta who raped the bishop of Fano, and in
factall the minorpointsthatmightaid one in forming an historic
ratherthana fancifulidea ofhis characterseem "shroudedin mys-
tery"or ratherlies.
I suppose one has to "select." If I findhe was TOO bloodyquiet
and orderlyit will ruin the canto."4

Pound's final advice was "No, Mr. Quinn, don't you never try to
write a epict [sic], it is too bloody complicated."
Pound may have passed on to his reader too directlythe com-

Margaret Dickie 823

plications of writingan epic, forcingthe reader to do too much of
the work. But the fragmentationof his writingstyle was neither a
willfulphilological shorthand nor a lax refusal of authorial respon-
sibility so much as it was an effortto express the poet's sense of
the fragmentaryquality of all writing. Beginning Canto 8 with a
reference to another poem's ending and his own poem's earlier
beginning in reflections on Eliot's words, Pound draws attention
immediately to the continuityof reading and writing, the impos-
sibility of beginning or finding a beginning for a text. Even his
own quarrel with Eliot's use of fragmentsmay be set in a larger
context by reference-through the quick slash of an argument-
to the "slanging" of truth and the muse of epic poetry. The mod-
ernist debate with history and the disagreements among two
friendshave ancient origins in suspicions that poets may be slov-
enly with words, bitching the facts.
Yet such a reading may still enjoy its own playfulness. Slow
reading need not be ponderous, tedious, or unduly solemn. Mis-
quoting Eliot and then placing the exact quotation in parentheses,
Pound opens this line to elaborate interpretationofhis relationship
with Eliot's poem, demonstrating economically the wide-ranging
implications that particular choices of words may enjoy. Or again,
sporting with decorum, Pound provides himself with a means of
overcoming his own undue reverence for the ancients and unset-
tling any such apprehensions on the part of his readers. Even the
determined irrelevance of fact-"That Alessandro was negroid"-
can suggest the mental clutter through which we attempt to read
or write any document.
The fragmentationof the Malatesta cantos allows differentun-
derstandings of their arrangements and purposes. Michael Bern-
stein compares Pound's ideogramic treatmentof historyto the in-
ductive procedures of Agassiz and Froebenius. For him, the Mal-
atesta cantos are a series of vividly selected episodes fromwhich
emerges a picture of an era splendid in its patronage of the arts
but limited by warfare,political instability,personal excesses. Mi-
chael Harper sees Pound's Malatesta sequence as a critical reading
of primarysources. Hugh Kenner claims that the Malatesta cantos
conserve the vigor of actual documents, convey a senso morale and
a purpose, while Joseph Riddel thinksof the cantos as "a signifying
machine, a machine producing signs out of an encounter with
"
signs.
In one way or another, these differentreadings rely on the text

824 The Cantos: Slow Reading

 as adding up to something, coming together into some form and
purpose. But Pound's own discontinuous method does not add up;
it breaks down, fragments,and pulls apart as the philologist pores
over other texts, dissecting them and reproducing his dissections.
If his aim is ultimately to present an interpretationof Malatesta
Sigismundo and a portrait of his age, to make judgments or pro-
duce signs, he never gets to that point in the cantos, or rather he
does not systematically work toward any of these ends. Pound
seems content to demonstrate in the Malatesta cantos his extreme
skills as a reader of documents, focusingon the open and endlessly
emendable process itself rather than on the final translation or
interpretationthat it might provide.
More than twentyyears of reading and writingbeyond the Mal-
atesta cantos broadened Pound's interests and confirmed certain
judgments of history,but did not essentially change his method of
writing. The philologist's interest in fragments, as well as his
knowledge of equivalent terms or related words, intensifiedin this
period as Pound's interpretationofhistorysimplifiedand stiffened.
In the lengthy usurious center of The Cantos, the profuse out-
pouring of poems between 1930 and 1940, Pound's text becomes
more fragmented, verbally playful, self-reflexive, as he relies
heavily on a single key to history.Pausing in Canto 46 to comment
on his historical method, Pound reveals also its philological bias:
19 yearson thiscase /firstcase. I have set downpartof
The Evidence. Part/communesepulchrum
Aurumest communesepulchrum.Usura,communesepulchrum.
helandroskaiheleptoliskai helarxe.
Hic Geryonest. Hic hyperusura
(46.234-35)
The judgment is clearly stated: usury is death. As a historian,
Pound is inflexible and dogmatic; but as a poet, he is playful,
flexinglanguage, reveling in linguisticflourishes. Pound is no sci-
entist weary fromhis lengthy task nor, despite his claim, does he
set down evidence, even part of the evidence. Rather, the case
method as he practices it here is a play on words, applying to
usury the epithets designed forHelen of Troyand adding one new
but related term. Yet Pound's sense that he could spend nineteen
years on part of the evidence indicates that his object is a kind of
impossible and superhuman thoroughness rather than the presen-
tation of proof or the rounding out of an argument, the aim of the
perfectionistas philologist rather than of the scientist or the apol-

Margaret Dickie 825

 ogist. Writingthe cantos in these years, Pound seems to be aware
simply of how little he has done, how much remains. He shows
no indication that he can or will bring his work to an end, no sense
that his method is inadequate, no anxiety about the process.
The end came long before he was prepared for it, canceling
temporarilyhis work on the case against usury, destroyinghis po-
litical hopes, locking him into the solitude at Pisa. But worst of
all, at Pisa his books were taken away; he had only the Confucius
that he had taken with him when he was captured, the Bible that
he had been given at the Detention Training Center, and The
Pocket Book of Verse found on the outhouse seat there. His lifelong
habit of critical reading came to a halt, and in his misery he calls
out for its return-"with one day's reading a man may have the
key in his hands." Yet, he knows too that a whole lifetime of
reading had brought him to this end, and one more day could not
reverse his fate. Much as Pound might have been tempted by the
reading, he could no longer read in the old analytical way.
Although in his early criticalessays he claimed to regard reading
as an inspirational act, he had himself always read to take apart,
to reduce to fragments,to dissect the record, because he read with
the conviction that discourse could sustain that kind of analysis,
reveal in that way "the marrow of wisdom," as he said in Poetry
Canto 1. Even when the record gave way, revealing only the
reading of a reading, as in the pope's faulty indictment against
Malatesta, forexample, still Pound kept on reading and correcting
readings, acknowledging himself as a part of a process, between
the beginning he could not find and the end he neglected to seek.
At Pisa, the books had been taken away, the "suave eyes, quiet,"
but even more important, the analytic and fragmentingimpulses
were suppressed by the greater need to affirm,to integrate, to
gather, and to be sustained.
Tryingto summon up words to write, to startagain, Pound opens
the Pisan Cantos with a view of the end that makes all beginnings
pointless. He writes:
The enormoustragedyofthedreamin thepeasant's
bentshoulders
Manes! Manes was tannedand stuffed,
Thus Ben and la Clara a Milano
by the heels at Milano
Thatmaggotsshd/eat thedead bullock
DIGONOS, Atyovou,but thetwicecrucified

826 The Cantos: Slow Reading

 wherein history
willyoufindit?
yetsaythisto thePossum:a bang,nota whimper,
witha bangnotwitha whimper,
To buildthecityofDioce whoseterracesare thecolourofstars.
(74.425)
No end so final as this one, we might imagine. As Pound ex-
amines the events ofhis own time, he judges them with customary
severity,but it is a severitynow edged with melodrama. The dis-
paritybetween the dream Pound has projected in the "peasant's
bent shoulders" and the actual burden those shoulders could and
did bear forces a reevaluation of Pound's assessment of the trage-
dy's enormity.Reading now with great speed and makingconnec-
tionsbetween the twice-bornDionysus, the crucifiedPersian sage,
the end of the world remembered from Eliot's early poem, and
his own times, Pound's verbal associations seem to be as quixotic
as his historicaljudgments. The ''bang" of the "twice crucified"is
beyond imagining, but not because historyfails to provide other
examples of the tragic end of dictators.
Pound's weariness and his metaphorical confusion are under-
standable and appear to find another expression in the unfinished
constructions,each line hanging suspended in the opening con-
struction. But this incomplete phrasing in a passage about the
end-where in poetry will you find it? Pound writes only part of
his text, leaving the rest in the margins. Describing the death of
Mussolini and of his own political hope and historical vision, ac-
cepting apparently the finalityof the end, Pound is at the same
time leaving everythingopen rhetorically.It is not weariness but
some prolonged hope that may account for this construction,an
unwillingnessto foresee and foretellthe end, even when he takes
that as his ostensible subject.
The constructionof these lines is peculiar. They do not forma
single sentence, punctuated as they are by odd commas, excla-
mation points, slashes, and question marks, but they do end with
a period and cluster around the single idea of death. Thus, they
have a greater coherence than Pound's usual poetic unit. Difficult
as it seems and discontinuous as it may sound, still this passage
sustains its focus on a single subject fromthe "dream" to the "city
of Dioce." But the principle of fragmentationthat has operated at
the surfaceof the cantos up to this point has not been abandoned;
it has simply moved to another level. The surfaceis more contin-
uous here in this opening because the vision is less clear or rather

Margaret Dickie 827

becausetheeyesthatbeholdthatvisionhaveclouded.Poundhas
anticipated
sucha judgmentby writing,"The suave eyes,quiet,
not scornful."
The synaesthesiaofthisline expressestheuncertainty, a mood
enhancedby the adjectiveson eitherside of it, whichpull in
oppositedirections.Suave eyes, like the "suave air" lateron in
the passagethatmaygive way to scirocco theseare eyes with
the visionin abeyance.Theymayremainquiet,curiouslyeither
blindtovisionorblindedbyitin thesamewaythatEliotimagines
the wastelander, "Looking into the heart of light, the silence." But
the eyes will not again turn "scornful" since Pound is quick to
warn, "What you depart fromis not the way." Pound has lost the
way, and he is waiting now quietly fornew guideposts to the end,
new maps to read, new events to interpret.
Not reading in these cantos, he is remembering, engaged in a
kind of retrospective rereading without the texts. Adding up, not
dividing, Pound seeks now the whole, not the part, strainingto-
ward a summary. To help in this impossible task, he turns to
methods long familiar,playing on sounds of words by splicing the
name of Odysseus to the name Wanjina, the Australian god, and
then to Ouan Jin, a Chinese man of letters:
'I am noman,mynameis noman
But Wanjinais, shallwe say,Ouan Jin
or the manwithan education
and whosemouthwas removedby hisfather
because he made too manythings..
(74.426-27)
It is simply a trickof associations by sound and transliteration,and
it provides no solace to the despairing poet.
In this firstof the Pisan cantos which seems to have such diffi-
cultyproviding an end foritselfas well as forthe twenty-fiveyears
of work on the cantos that it crowns, Pound nonetheless writes for
the firsttime with a consciousness of the end. He courts it, in-
sisting that he is "a man on whom the sun has gone down,>"and
he resists it, claiming that he "firstmust destroyhimselfere others
destroy him" (74.430). He prepares himself for death, remem-
bering "Lordly men are to earth o'ergiven /these the companions,"'
but in the end, he dismisses the dead-ended life with, "I don't
know how humanity stands it / with a painted paradise at the end
of it / without a painted paradise at the end of it" (74.436).

828 The Cantos: Slow Reading

 Knowledge ofthe end brought a differenttest ofevents to Pound
and a differentpurpose in reading them. He had, up to this point,
asked how things worked, not what they mattered. But, his con-
dition changed, he now presents himself, "As a lone ant from a
broken ant-hill / from the wreckage of Europe, ego scriptor"7
(76.458). At this point, not wanting to add to the wreckage by
taking more things apart, now he seeks the unbroken, the inde-
structible,and he finds it among other places in memories and in
nature, the "clouds over the Pisan meadows" C"asfine as any to be
seen /fromthe peninsula" (76.459). Such sightscannot sustain the
poet for long, however, and he ends the canto weeping and ex-
cusing himself: "States of mind are inexplicable to us" (76.460).
States of mind may well be inexplicable to us, but they also
force us to explanations, and out of his sense of desolation there
comes to Pound the memory of his window in Venice at the turn
of the century,and he acknowledges forthe firsttime that "things
have ends and beginnings" (76.462). With this awareness now of
process as not unending but definitelylimited, Pound can accom-
modate himselfto the end and to a renewed interestin the routes
by which he has arrived there. Once the end itself has been
sighted, the far made near by being imagined, Pound is prepared
to look back over his life and summarize the stages of his accom-
plishments. "To break the pentameter, that was the firstheave,"
(81.518) he says. "But to have done instead ofnot doing," "To have
gathered fromthe air a live tradition,""This is not vanity,"he says
(81.521-22). Finally, despite his protestations to the contrary,it
was his vanity that saved him.
The Pisan sequence faces the end by gathering into its poems
everything that Pound could remember-the memories of the
women he loved, the visions thatvisited him, the accomplishments
in which he prided himself, and finallythe actual details of the
Detention Training Center. The process of writing itself was re-
storative and consolatory because Pound realized that what had
endured the wreckage would endure the end that was to come.
His respect forsuch endurance was not entirelynew, since he had
always had an appreciation for the strong-for the words and
events thatwould hold up under scrutiny.In Canto 74, Pound talks
of the "stone knowing the formwhich the carver imparts it" (430),
and later in Canto 79 of "the imprintof the intaglio" that depends
"in part on what is pressed under it / the mould must hold what
is poured into it" (486). As the artist's materials so the artisthim-

Margaret Dickie 829

self, and Pound had, like the stone, held up to time's carvings,
and like the intaglio could withstand the pressure.
The Pisan Cantos are a testimony to Pound's character, to his
passion for the written character, to the strengthof his curiosity,
and to the breadth of his interests. He had been wrong-wrong
in details and in large programs, but he had not failed in the quality
of his affectionsnor in the integrityof his early conviction, ex-
pressed in Poetry Canto 1, that "the truth / Is inside this dis-
course." The case against usury gave way to the case for Ezra
Pound, and it took only a short time to set down the evidence
accumulated over a lifetimeofreading and experience. In this task,
Pound was aided by his expertise in the art of slow reading. He
could sort through his own life, reading it as an open book in a
language partially known yet still to be fullylearned. The enter-
prise offeredhim the self-knowledge that is the reward of careful
reading and writing.
The end did not come at Pisa, however closely it had ap-
proached, and when its presence abated Pound went back to his
reading and to the subject thathad always absorbed his attention-
the rightuse of words. Pound had another twentyyears of writing
before he came again to consider his own death and the disorder
of his life's project. Then, in Canto 110, written almost half a
centuryafterthe Malatesta cantos, he returns to the quotation he
had used there to dissociate himself from Eliot. Now, he writes,
"From time's wreckage shored, / these fragmentsshored against
ruin" (781). Ruin at hand, Pound identifies with his old friend,
forgettingthat he had actually spent his time not shoring frag-
ments, but examining them, breaking them down into smaller
units, analyzing and dissecting them. Only in the shadow of the
death cells at Pisa had his mind turned conservative, anxious to
shore fragmentsfromtime's wreckage.
In the draftsand fragmentsof his final years, he seems unable
to remember all that he had writtenbefore Pisa and even some of
his consoling thoughts there. "How is it far if you think of it?" he
had asked then, imagining that if he could imagine the end, he
would understand the process. Now, even thatvision is foresworn.
"No man can see his own end," Pound says with his own death
clearly in view (113.787). He is whistling up to the graveyard,
claiming with the bravado of old age, "The Gods have not re-
turned. 'They have never left us.' / They have not returned"
(113.787).

830 The Cantos: Slow Reading

 Remembering now the far past more clearly than he can recall
the interval in between or the present moment, Pound's mind is
flooded with his earliest works. He came to see himself as "A
blown husk that is finished recalling the wastelanders he had
described in Canto 7 as "Thin husks I had known as men, / Dry
casques of departed locusts / speaking a shell of speech . . . /
Propped between chairs and table . . . / Words like the locust-
shells, moved by no inner being; / A dryness calling for death"?
(7.26). In his present mood, however, the call for death comes
with the conviction that "the light sings eternal" (from115.794).
"Time, space, /neither life nor death is the answer," he continues,
hearing now the siren call of eternity.The contempt of the young
man for the thin husks has deepened into fear, and the fear has
engendered a wild hope in the old man.
But the mind would not let go despite this valedictory, and
Pound turns fromthe eternally singing light to consider again in
the summational style of the Pisan Cantos: "These concepts the
human mind has attained" (116.795). It is a strange list:
To makeCosmos-
To achievethepossible-
Muss.,wreckedforan error,
Buttherecord
thepalimpest-
a littlelight
in greatdarkness-
(116.795)
One line is undercut by the next, the Cosmos disintegratinginto
the great darkness by stages, checked by the "possible," by the
"record," "4a little light," but moving nonetheless toward disorder
and chaos. Or perhaps the reader alone moves them in that di-
rection since they do not form any grammatical unit. Typically
Pound leaves the phrases incomplete, and the appositions without
clear relationships.
Pound tries again to say what he has attained, casting about for
parallels, and discovering CJustinian's/ a tangle of works unfin-
ished." That image calls up its opposite: "I have brought the great
ball of crystal;/ who can liftit? / Can you enter the great acorn of
light?" Pound's mind, even in despair and fatigue,is workingalong
familiarlines tryingto findthe rightterm, the suitable equivalent
or comparison, in order to describe his project, and choosing

Margaret Dickie 831

widely disparate terms-a code of laws, a ball of crystal. The text
he is contemplating now is his own long poem, reading it at this
point not word for word but as a whole, searching forthe correct
term that would conclude by classifyingit. He notes its fragmen-
tarynature, and yet now he wants also to point out the model of
perfectfinishthat stands in back of the fragments.
Pound grew old in The Cantos, and ifin the finaldraftshe forgot
what he was actually about, there remained to him nonetheless
certain familiarhabits of mind. The concepts the human mind had
attained were difficultto summon up; but the conceptualizing
habits held fast. The "mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning,"he says
(113.790). To the end, Pound continued to combine words with
the philologist's skill to release their lurking distinction, man
seeking good, /doing evil," or to manipulate the rhetoricalsurprise
of transferredterms, "where the dead walked / and the living were
made of cardboard" (115.794), or simply to bring proverbial con-
trastingpairs together: "Many errors/ a little rightness" (116.797).
He could use words with a kind of philological flourish to call up
a whole historyof associations, claiming, and probably believing,
that his whole work could be saved by a phrase: "I tried to make
a paradiso / terrestre" ("Notes for CXVII et seq.," 802).
The analytical nature of Pound's reading endured to the end.
He liked to see everythingthat was there, all the surprisingparts,
the ideal against the real, the "vision of the Madonna / above the
cigar butts" (116.795). He moved his poem forwardhere as he had
throughoutThe Cantos by bringingtogether divisive elements, by
taking them apart, by recombining them. He imagined that he
could not make his poem cohere when he had actually spent a
lifetime demonstrating his genius for fragmentingwords, lines,
concepts, documents. In these finalcantos, as in the Pisan Cantos,
Pound writes about the end in open form,acknowledging finality
by denying its form. Such habits of mind kept The Cantos open
when the interpretationof history that underpinned them might
have, indeed should have, caused the poem to come to a dead
halt. The mind that loved Douglas's economic theories had to be
checked and disturbed by that other mind almost usurious in the
value it could create fromother texts.
Pound's final concern was for his readers. "And as to who will
copy this palimpsest?" he asks in Canto 116 (797). He could not
accept the end despite the splendor he saw before him without
imagining a new Pound, another chance to read the writing and

832 The Cantos: Slow Reading

write the reading. The person he seeks is his own younger self,
the reader of texts, the spectator he had left in Poetry Canto 1
outside the diorama booth, contemplating the truth inside dis-
course. To such a person, he bequeathes the "errors and wrecks"
thatlie about him, the notes that "do not cohere," "Many errors";
in short,he has leftforhis futurereader the unfinishedwork with
instructionon how to complete it by a reading. Then he swerves,
as if he hoped to claim more forhimself,to provide a new guide
forhis readers, to show them how to finishthe text: "But to affirm
the gold thread in the pattern" (116.797). The infinitivelooks both
ways-backward to his own ambition and forwardto his hopes for
his readers, but it is wishfulthinking.To "affirmthe gold thread
in the weave of The Cantos is both to set the rightvaluation on
gold and to appreciate Pound's own judgment in this matter.The
phrase looks back to the usury canto: "None learneth to weave
gold in her pattern" (65.230). Pound explains this line in a letter
to Carlo Izzo by claiming thatin the Middle Ages in Rapallo actual
gold thread was woven into the cloth.6With usury,such practices
ceased. Still, at the end, to affirmthe gold thread is not to weave
it but to findit, to value it where it is. Pound testifieshere to the
rightnessof his own principles and to their continuityin the pat-
tern that is his poem. Beyond that, he makes a claim for those
partsofthe cantos thatare like "a littlerightness,""A littlelight"-
the points of greatest value and illumination.
As to his readers, what pattern can they find when he himself
admits to ample wrecks? But that is precisely the point ofreading.
Pound is putting his readers, perhaps consciously but certainly
with a greater shrewdness than the weariness of this canto might
indicate, in exactlythe position fromwhich he started:outside the
booth, lookingin, anxious to get the inside out and tormentedwith
contradictoryideas about how to do it. If reading were simply a
copyingof the palimpsest or ifreading were only an affirmation of
the figure in the carpet, it would be a task easily assignable to
clerks or to particularlysensitive geometricians. But reading is
something beyond this passive copying and active affirming,as
Pound himselfhad discovered in a lifetime.
For Pound, reading had always been an essentiallyantagonistic
act. He sought out adversarial texts, writtenin languages remote
and difficultor frommotives intentionallyperverse or by people
obscured in time. He read what he did not quite understand,
understood what he had not quite read, because reading as he

Margaret Dickie 833

practisedit was an endlesslycreativeact ofdissectionand recon-
struction,ofturning theinsideoutand theoutsidein,ofhonoring
thespacebetweenthereaderandthetexthe read.Thereis always
a marginin the textsPound read and finallyin the texthe had
written,since his writingno less thanhis readingwas creative,
antagonistic,fragmented. Anditwasnevermoreso thaninhislast
days,whenhe turnedtoconsiderhisowntextanddirecthisreader
in thereading.
It was nottheworkhe had hopedtowrite,he seemsto say,but
he had offered no clear idea of such a workeitherearlyor late.
Justas at thebeginning withall beforehim,Poundcouldwonder,
"What'sleftforme to do?" so at theend withthecolossusbehind
him, he could referto it as "a littlerightness,""'a littlelight."He
is protesting,apologizing, despairing, boasting,bothat thebegin-
ningand end. By leavinghis textopen in thisway,he closed it
splendidly: a littlelightafterall "to lead backto splendour." Be-
cause as a philologist his interestwas in the fragment, he could
build his poem by and on fragments, tearingdown completed
structures includinghis ownworkin progress.Thus he keptthe
workalwaysbeforehim,open to his readers,accessibleto them
as the readersof reading.His finalgesturewas to beckonthe
readerto theplace he was aboutto vacate.
Poundhas had anynumberofeagerresponsesto his invitation,
buthe has also had difficulty attracting a readerlikehimself, and
thatnotbecausehe was toorevolutionary, toowide-ranging in his
interests,or too erudite,butratherbecausehe was old-fashioned
evenin hisowntimeand nowofcourseantiquarian in hisreading
habits.Pound'swas the last generationin Americato receivea
classicaleducation,and thustoappreciatetheartofphilology. The
Cantoslooksbacktotheetymological punninginWaldenorEmer-
son's essays,and it shareswiththese nineteenth-century works
notonlythe dissectingartofthe philologist but the appreciation
ofCosmoson whichit is based. Thoreau,tracingthe etymology
ofthewordleafon the assumption thatthe "Makerofthisearth
butpatenteda leaf' and one hillsidecouldillustrate "theprinciple
ofall the operationsofNature,"is close to Pound'spracticesand
to his faithin a singlekeyto understanding. Writingforgenera-
tionsofreaderswho were and were to be less well trainedthan
Thoreau, Pound took the opportunityto revolutionizetheir
readinghabitsby teachingthemtheancientartofslowreading.
ofIllinois,Champaign-Urbana
University
834 The Cantos:Slow Reading
 NOTES
Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 5. Hereafter cantos
will be cited by number and page in parentheses in the text.
2 Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1952), 51.
3 Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1964), 126.
4 Daniel D. Pearlman quotes fromthese unpublished letters in "Appendix A," The
Barb of Time: On the Unity of Ezra Pound's Cantos (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1969), 302.
3 See Michael Andre Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern
Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980), 38-39; Michael Harper, "Truth
and Calliope: Ezra Pound's Malatesta," PMLA 96 (January1981): 99; Hugh Kenner,
The Pound Era (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 428; Joseph N. Riddel,
"Pound and the Decentered Image," The Georgia Review 29 (1975): 590.
6 The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound: 1907-1941, ed. D. D. Paige (New York:New
Directions, 1971), 304. I am indebted to Hugh Kenner foralerting me to this line of
reference in Pound's work.

Margaret Dickie 835