Savitri

 V

The Cantos

Apart from Whitman, whom Sri Aurobindo obviously admired, though with the necessary qualifications, he was doubtless also influenced as a practitioner of verse by the work of contemporaries like Yeats, Eliot and Ezra Pound. While the extent of the influence might not have been very appreciable, there can be no question about the reality of Sri Aurobindo's intelligent interest in contemporary English poetry. Passages from The Hollow Men are scanned in Sri Aurobindo's essay on quantitative metre as examples of the new 'ametric poetry', and once, in 1946, in defence of his use of the French word 'flasque' in Savitri, he said that he had done it "somewhat after the manner of Eliot and Ezra Pound".'³ Whether Sri Aurobindo had any close acquaintance with the Cantos it is difficult to say; but he certainly knew about this unique 'work in progress' in a general way, and any major poetic intelligence and endeavour is bound to exert some kind of pull on other contemporary poetic powers and intelligences.

      A Draft of XXX Cantos appeared as early as 1933, though individual Cantos might have achieved magazine publication earlier still; in the course of the next twenty years came out in succession Eleven New Cantos, The Fifth Decade of Cantos, Cantos LII-LXXI and The Pisan Cantos, all preceding Sri Aurobindo's passing away in 1950; since then, two more instalments—Section: Rock-Drill (LXXXV-XCV) and Thrones: XVI-CIX—have come out. The piecemeal appearance of the Cantos and the piecemeal appearance of Savitri seemed to run parallel to each other, and even their 'obscurity' seemed to put them—widely different though they were from each other—in a class rather apart. The Cantos are evidently still in progress, and perhaps they are not meant ever to be concluded in a conclusive manner. What are the

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Cantos about? Can they be viewed as a unity, as an epic, even as the American epic?

      Two other American poets of our time—Hart Crane and Archibald MacLeish—have also tried their hands at epic poetry. Crane's ambitious poem The Bridge (1930) was an attempt to write something at once less personal and less universal than Song of Myself —something that was positively, almost objectively, American. The 'bridge' is the single spanning symbolic image that tries, though not altogether successfully, to hold together national myths like Pocahontas and Rip Van Winkle and the visible material realities of American civilisation. Structurally weak though often brilliantly evocative, The Bridge is said to approximate to a "highly sophisticated, highly syncopated local epic."³⁴

      MacLeish's Conquistador (1932) is a short epic written in the terza rima, a difficult measure which he handles with consummate mastery. The theme is the conquest of Mexico, but through resolved limitation MacLeish achieves both intensity and concentration; and all is presented from one angle: the emotion and memory of Bernal, the whilom hero (though only one of the minor ones) and the present aged narrator. The centre of interest has been adroitly shifted from the action to the memory of the action, from the tumult of the battle to the awakened private sensibility long after the event. It is said that MacLeish was himself influenced by the Cantos, at any rate the first Canto, when he wrote his Conquistador?⁵ MacLeish would appear to have transferred to the war of conquest in Mexico the modern sensibility—the sensibility that we associate with the work of war poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon—towards all war and the stupidity and the pity and the futility of war.

      To return to the Cantos—for it is here if anywhere that the American epic is to be hailed—there can be no doubt regarding its polyphonic richness and its exasperating improvisations. What is the epic about? (And is it an epic, after all?) "The Cantos are talk, talk, talk", says Allen Tate, but he also adds: "The Cantos are a book

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of marvels—marvels that he has read about, or heard of, or seen.. .The Cantos are a sort of Golden Ass."³⁶ Writing again eighteen years later, Tate declared that his views had not changed; the Cantos remained "formless, eccentric, and personal".³⁷ But others, notably Hugh Kenner, have tried to infer the form underlying the apparent formlessness and incoherence. An epic certainly, though a "plotless" one. Waves start and swell and recede and subside and start again; there is a fusion of "logical independence and aesthetic interdependence of successive images", resulting in a new kind of unity.^3S It cannot be that all this poetic chatter and the many sudden bursts of imagery are about "nothing". The truth, perhaps, is that there is not one rigid form but the possibilities of many forms; as Kenner puts it, "a slight change in the angle of cut will reveal a wholly new surface".³⁹ Kenner's own analyses are very rewarding, especially the 'volitional' cut that reveals a Divina Commedia in the Cantos—with its own Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradise⁴⁰

      Nevertheless, the Cantos remain, on a first or second or even third reading, a maddening work. It is an important and immense poetic creation, a nodal point in contemporary English poetry. Crane and MacLeish, Eliot and Yeats, themselves considerable poets, have been influenced by the Cantos and the Poundian poetics and aesthetics. But there must be a clue to this labyrinth, however tenuous, however almost invisible; else the Cantos cannot have held the field so long. The opening of the first Canto is masterly:

      And then went down to the ship,

      Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly seas, and

      We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

      Boresheep aboard her, and our bodies also

      Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward

      Bore us out onward with bellying canvas,

      Circe's this craft, the trim-coifed goddess.

A voyage, then; Odysseus, obviously; and there is Circe, too. Is it the Odyssey again in a Poundian version, perhaps in all the four Dantean

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senses, the literal, the allegorical, the analogical, the ethical? We return to Odysseus from time to time:

      What have you done, Odysseus,

      We know what you have done...⁴¹

      'What gain with Odysseus,

      'They that died in the whirlpool

      'And after many vain labours,

      'Living by stolen meat, chained to the rowingbench,

      'And lie by night with the goddess?'⁴²

      Knowledge the shade of a shade,

      Yet must thou sail after knowledge

      Knowing less than drugged beasts...

      To the cave art thou called, Odysseus,...⁴³

 Allen Tate guardedly writes: "Mr. Pound's world is the scene of a great Odyssey, and everywhere he lands it is the shore of Circe, where men 'lose all companions' and are turned into swine. It would not do to push this hint too far, but I will risk one further point: Mr. Pound is a typically modern, rootless, and internationalised intelligence. "⁴⁴ This is all journey and no destination, this world is all circumference and no centre. But the Odysseus-clue is valuable, although it will not do, as Tate warns us, to pull it too hard, lest it snap altogether. Kenner makes the further point that, even as Tiresias is central to the scheme of The Waste Land, Odysseus is to that of the Cantos:

      In one sense, the substance of the Cantos is what Odysseus sees,

      as that of The Waste Land is what Tiresias sees. The distinction

      between these two personae gives us one measure of Pound's poem.

      Tiresias the shade, foresuffering all, is capable only of psychic

      action...Odysseus, polumetis, many-minded, fertile in strategems,

      is engaged in active amelioration of conditions for himself and his

      men, involved in factive protagonist in what he sees.⁴⁵

In the first Canto, when Odysseus sets out on his voyage, Tiresias tells him:

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      'A second time? why? man of ill star,

      'Facing the sunless dead and this joyless region?

      'Stand from the fosse, leave me my bloody bever

      'For soothsay'.

      And I stepped back,

      And he strong with the blood, said then: 'Odysseus

      'Shalt return through spiteful Neptune, over dark seas,

      'Lose all companions'.

Is this really a parable of Pound's own adventure with the Cantos? Is it Tiresias warning Odysseus, or the Muse warning Pound? It may be both; and it is spoken with the accents of prophecy.

      To Pound himself the Cantos are no more than "the tale of the tribe", the tale of the American people, the tale of the human race. Antiquity, the mediaeval world, the modern world: the West, the East: fact and fable: history and anecdotage: persons, ideas-—all are thrown into these kaleidoscopic patterns of the tale of the tribe. Allusions and echoes both baffle and enrich the understanding, and the jostling together of poetry and banality, esoteric Chinese ideographs and dry notebook jottings, teases us to the point of exasperation. But Pound evidently feels that only through the cultivation of what Kenner has called "multiple foci of interest" the tale of so amazing a species as homo sapiens could be truthfully and adequately told.

      Sri Aurobindo's preoccupation with Yoga led to his retirement from politics, and he spent the last forty years of his life in Pondicherry, in a sort of self-forged prison. Ezra Pound's open identification with politics during the Second World War led first to his isolation at Pisa and later to his relegation to St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., on the recommendation of a commission of psychiatrists (he was ultimately released in 1958). Starting from opposite directions, as it were, these two great poets wrote some of their best work in isolation and seclusion.

      Ezra Pound the pro-fascist and the anti-Semitist belongs to contemporary political history, but the creator of the Cantos can be

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considered as a figure apart. The Cantos continue their steady march, and continue to delight and intrigue by turns. The Pisan Cantos, which won for him the Bollingen Award, include passages like that on Vanity in the magnificent Canto LXXXI, which is even more articulate, being more direct, than the famous passage on Usury in Canto XLV.⁴⁶ Then came, from the asylum, Section: Rock-Drill, eleven more Cantos, which drew from Dudley Fitts the remark that the whole stupendous undertaking was but "a willed and perverse failure". More Cantos continued to appear (some in the Hudson Review), and the very latest bunch is Thrones: XCVI-CIX,

      In short, the cosmos continues

      and there is an observation somewhere in Morrison.

      leading to Remy?

      Bombs fell, but not quite on Sant Ambrogio.⁴⁷

      "The cosmos continues", that's the main thing. In Canto LXXXII, Pound openly merges with Whitman, feeling, "that he too is making the sort of cosmically penetrating poem towards which Whitman aspired."⁴⁸ The Pisan Cantos, in fact, more than the Cantos that preceded (except perhaps the first seven) or have so far succeeded them, seem to contain the essence of Pound's effort, "to make the past and present, memory, experience and learning, into a living whole which will sum up the whole work."⁴⁹ Its ambiguities admitted, this tremendous poetic adventure deserves to be hailed as "a Human Comedy in several dimensions and many voices",⁵⁰ an evolving epic of a cosmos still in a process of becoming. "It is as though", writes Roy Harvey Pearce, "Odysseus, or Aeneas, or Beowulf, or Mio Cid, or even Dante, under the persona of Adam (in whose fall/we sinned all) had been compelled, out of some dark necessity, to write his own history, and in writing it, to make it."⁵¹ The Cantos may thus be almost called a sort of universal congress of epic heroes, or a junction where many epic highways meet, or even a Babel where many epic languages strive towards a basic unity of understanding and harmony.

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