The Cantos of Ezra Pound and The Greek Gods

            The Cantos begins by retelling a key part of Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey.  In Book 11 of The Odyssey, referred to as “the Nekuia,” meaning journey into the underworld, Odysseus undertakes a journey at the goddess Circe’s urging.   It is significant that Pound, using the story of Odysseus’ return from the Trojan War, chooses to start his long poem with this incident.  Odysseus sails with his crew to the “western limit” of the world to learn from the dead prophet Tiresias how he could return home to Ithaca.[i]   In the version of The Odyssey that was written down in Athens in the fifth century BCE, this passage comes roughly halfway, Book 11 of 24, through the work.  Pound, writing about 2500 years late, makes his own version of the myth to suit his needs.

            The Cantos refers to The Odyssey frequently, but Pound also freely invokes Homeric Hymns.[ii]   Pound assumes that the reader is familiar not only with Greek mythology but also with allusions to Classical Greece.  For example, he frequently refers to Aphrodite as Cythera, a name associated with the island of Cytherea where legend has it that Aphrodite was born out of sea foam.[iii]  Pound does not alter the attributes of these mythical figures; instead he deploys them to support the narrative thread of The Cantos.  For example, in Canto 23, and Canto 24, he includes allusions to Anchises, the father of Aeneas by Aphrodite, and the tale of Hermes stealing Apollo’s cattle.

            Odysseus’ story is archetypal.  A man striving to return home must overcome numerous challenges along the way.  Not only does Pound make selective use of parts of The Odyssey in The Cantos, he also makes technical changes to Homer’s meter in Canto 1.  Pound had earlier published a translation about a sailor’s journey, entitled The Seafarer.[iv]  This poem is based on Anglo Saxon poetry from about 900 A.D., that is, probably a thousand years more recent than Homer.  Early Anglo Saxon poetry depended mainly on a four beat line, with alliteration, to drive its verse forward and so Pound’s treatment, condensing but not altering the sense of the Greek original, is markedly different in sound effects to the recent translation of The Odyssey by Robert Fagles.   For example, compare:  “Now down we came to the ship at the water’s edge/we hauled and launched her into the sunlit breakers first” (Fagles) with “And then went down to the ship/Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea” (Pound).  Pound’s version is crisper and in the tradition of English verse while Fagles attempts to follow the hexameters of Homer.   Having translated just enough of Book 11 to set the stage for his long poem, Pound abruptly interrupts the flow of the poem with the phrase: “Lie quiet Divus”.  Research yields the information that Divus is the name of somebody who had translated The Odyssey from Greek into Latin.[v]  Once this is understood, it becomes clear that Pound, who had access to both the Greek and Latin versions of The Odyssey, created an English version using an antique verse format deliberately, to make the point that he is just the latest in a series of bards to tell, and reinterpret, this mythic story.

            Canto 1 stops translating from Homer with Odysseus’ return to Circe’s isle.  Then to round off this poem, Pound introduces an image he says is worthy of worship, “Venerandam”: Aphrodite bearing “the golden bough of Argicida,” Hermes’ golden wand.[vi]  This combines two symbolic figures.  Aphrodite typically symbolizes love and Hermes is the guide who conducts souls to the underworld.  However, both of these gods are also associated with inspiration and poetry.  In the next Canto, Pound begins to combine other historical eras with Classical Greece as he begins to weave the tapestry of Cantos that will ultimately number more than one hundred.  In Canto II, the story of Dionysus kidnapped by pirates has center stage with allusions to Homer, Browning, So-shu and Picasso and others including King Pentheus who features in a famous Greek play about Dionysus, The Bacchae, by Euripides.  These allusions come before, during, and after, the depiction of the pirate’s ship becoming festooned with ivy, grape leaves and vines due to the power of  “the male god of vegetation.”[vii]  The story of Dionysus and the pirates is taken from the Homeric Hymn to Dionysus.[viii]  In Canto 2, Pound introduces the symbol of a Lynx, an animal sacred to Dionysus, and the Lynx will reappear later in the Cantos, particularly in Canto 79.

            In Canto 17, Pound devotes an entire Canto to the world of Classical Greece as he portrays images of Artemis, “the goddess of the fair knees…with white hounds leaping about her,” Zagreus (another name for Dionysus), and Odysseus cast up on the beach of the island of the Phaeacians.  This world is beautiful, fertile and full of light and comes as a striking contrast to Canto 16’s depiction of the “hell mouth” of the Second World War.[ix]  In Canto 17’s pastoral setting, Odysseus is depicted hiding in a cave near the beach, but we know, if we are familiar with The Odyssey, that Odysseus will soon be rescued.  The Pheaeacians will honor him and return him to his home on Ithaca.  From Pound’s translation in Canto 1, we know also that Tiresias prophesied that Odysseus would return home alone.   He will lose all of his friends and comrades either in the Trojan War or his return journey.  In Canto 16, which precedes the idyllic Canto 17, Pound mentions the names of his many comrades who died or suffered during World War 1.  Perhaps the reader is expected to draw the conclusion that like Odysseus, survivors of the Great War will now be able to return to a better world.

            Canto 79 is part of The Pisan Cantos, written while Pound was held captive in a military camp in Italy after the Second World War.   He had been arrested on charges of treason and was waiting to be sent back to the U.S. to face trial.  Dionysus is not mentioned in this Canto but his symbols abound as Pound contrasts the remembered fertility of an orchard with the bleakness of his captivity, held in solitary confinement in a wired cage.  In the subsequent Canto, Canto 80, Pound specifically compares himself to Odysseus, cast into the sea, before being washed up on the island of the Phaeacians: “hast’ou swum in a sea of air strip/through an aeon of nothingness,/when the raft broke and the waters went over me.”[x]  In Canto 74, which begins The Pisan Cantos, Pound had already identified himself as Odysseus: “I am noman, my name is noman.”[xi]  This is a reference to Book 9 of The Odyssey where Polyphemus, the Cyclops, has been blinded by “nobody.”[xii]

            When beginning to write The Cantos, Pound could not have anticipated the Odysseus-like travails that his own life would entail. At the beginning of The Cantos, written before 1920, Pound translates Homer to create a foundation on which to construct a modern myth that incorporates a larger world than Homer knew.  Pound will incorporate Norse mythology, the New World of the Americas, as well as China into the Classical World.  Later, as in Canto 79, written in 1945, it seems he is praying to the Homeric gods as he comforts himself with memories of antiquity.  Once again, Aphrodite and Hermes appear at the end of Canto 79, echoing the closing image of Canto 1.  Only now, in his prison cell, Pound needs Aphrodite’s love and Hermes’ guidance.

            “Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom.”  So begins Canto 81.  Pound refers to the sky god Zeus and to Demeter (Ceres), the goddess of fertility.  He is about to note that although Christianity is widespread there is little “religion.”    Again, Aphrodite (Cythera) is invoked to bless this union of earth and sky.  As the Cantos move towards completion, they were eventually abandoned unfinished, Pound continues to keep the Greek Gods nearby. In Canto 113, he writes: “The hells move in cycles/No man can see his own end/The Gods have not returned/“They have never left us”/They have not returned.”[xiii]  This appears to mean that while Pound knows in his heart that the gods remain omnipresent, they are invisible in modern life.  In the final published fragments of The Cantos, Pound states his desire to build an altar to Zagreus (Dionysus) and his mother Semele, the lover of Zeus.[xiv]  In the last fragment, he concludes The Cantos in the style of a Homeric bard:

                        “I have tried to write Paradise

                         Do not move

                                    Let the wind speak

                                                that is paradise.

                         Let the Gods forgive what I

                                                have made

                         Let those I love try to forgive

                                                what I have made.”[xv]

END

ENDNOTES

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[i] Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J. Lenardon, Classical Mythology, 8^th ed. (New York:             Oxford University Press, 2007) 20.530. 

[ii] Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era.  (Berkeley and Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 1971) 361.

[iii] Morford, 9.179.

[iv] Ezra Pound, Personae, (New York: New Directions, 1971) 64.

[v] Kenner, 350.

[vi] Ezra Pound, The Cantos, (New York: New Directions, 1981) 5.

[vii] Morford, 13.311.

[viii] Morford, 13.315.

[ix] The Cantos, 68

[x] The Cantos, 513.

[xi] The Cantos, 426.

[xii] Morford, 20.527.

[xiii] The Cantos, 787.

[xiv] The Cantos, 801.

[xv] The Cantos, 803.

Works Cited

Homer.  The Odyssey.  Trans. Robert Fagles.  New York: Penguin, 1996.

Kenner, Hugh.  The Pound Era.  Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California

            Press, 1971.

Morford, Mark P. O, and Lenardon, Robert J. Classical Mythology.  New York: Oxford

            University Press, 2007

Pound, Ezra.  The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1981.

Pound, Ezra.  Personae. New York: New Directions, 1971.