Resembling Pound: mimesis, translation, ideology - Ezra Pound - Post-ing Modernism

Criticism, Spring, 1993 by Joseph Kronick

Walking into nonsense is an experience for which there is no word. Nevertheless, it gives birth to myth and is also a fall. Language ceases to communicate itself; logos becomes mythos or story.

Pound's allegory closely resembles his famous account of the composition of "In a Station of a Metro" as a "one image poem ... a form of super-position, that is ... one idea set on top of another" (GB 89). Pound's "super-position" suggests a hierarchical and spatial form, as if the instant is not temporal but a palimpsest or the stratified layers of a geological site. Telling us how he destroyed a "thirty-line poem" about his "metro emotion" because it was a "work of 'second intensity,'" he presents the famous "hokku-like sentence: -

'The apparition of these faces in the crowd: Petals, on a wet black bough.'"

He concludes, "In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective" (GB 89). The poem is not so much the figurative rendering of the faces he saw emerging from the station but is the translation of the sensuous into the non-sensuous or inward thing. Yet the poem as it moves from "apparition" to image proves to be as much a temporal crossing as it is a mimetic doubling. Resemblance is contained not in the imitation of the emotion but in the transformation or crossing that displaces one image with another.

Pound distinguishes the image, "that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time" from the "mimetic or representational part" of a poet's work (GB 86; and see "A Few Don'ts" [1913] in LE 4]). This insistance upon the presentational as opposed to representational quality of the image reflects more than Pound's bias toward phanopoeia or language as visual image. He writes, "The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language" (GB 88). For critics following Hugh Kenner, such statements indicate Pound's belief that the image embodies what it represents, but in mimesis there must be an original doubling in order for the thing to make its appearance. We must distinguish this doubling from a mere acknowledgement of process, for Kenner and other critics after him have remarked on Pound's insistence that poetry reveal the latent energy in nature, as in Kenner's remark on the "Metro" poem: "For Pound's Imagism is energy, is effort. It does not appease itself by reproducing what is seen, but by setting some other seen thing into relation. . . . The |plot' of the poem is that mind's activity, fetching some new thing into the field of consciousness"(10) For Kenner, the Metro traveller's station is a double of Kore's or Persophone's underworld. The faces of the people exiting the station and Kore's departing Hades are brought together in the poet's consciousness. Kenner reads imagism as the originary doubling that makes super-positioning the movement of aletheia. To do so, he must introduce mythic narrative, super-imposing it upon Pound's own narrative of the poems' composition.(11) For Kenner the content of the poem, what it says, is external to the way it is said: "the poem is not its language" but" exists. . . . in this language"; it makes the poem visible as a rope makes visible a knot.(12) This metaphor corresponds to Plato's distinction between lexis, the manner of saying, and logos, what is said.