Paradiso ma non troppo: The Place of the Lyric Dante in the Late Cantos of Ezra Pound

Comparative Literature, Winter 2005 by Dasenbrock, Reed Way

This double citation of "Voi che 'ntendendo" and the Paradiso mysteriously reverses Pound's despair, and the canto ends in triumph:

I won't try to explicate all of this very beautiful and moving passage which I have discussed elsewhere, but the part most germane to the concerns of this essay is the line in Italian, which comes from Dante's great sestina "Al poco giorno," one of the nmepetrose. This is as untheological and unparadisal a poem as Dante ever wrote, a bleak comparison of the hardness or stoniness of his lady-not Beatrice, not the donna gentile, but a new lady who in line 14 "trae de la mente nostra ogn'altra donna" ("takes every other woman from our mind," Foster and Boyde 1.164, 165)-to the ombra or shade of the winter equinox. Those committed to seeing The Cantos as shaped like the Commedia, with a transcendent paradise as the poem's conclusion, obviously confront a major difficulty in the fact that this is the last quotation from Dante in The Cantos, a difficulty that has too often been avoided by not discussing the passage at all. But I think it makes perfect sense from the perspective on the Late Cantos I have tried to develop here.

For Pound, Dante's works don't form the orderly Dantescan rising focused on sacred love that they do in a Singletonian reading. Pound is much more interested in the Dante of the nontranscendent love lyrics, the Dante who went on writing love poetry about women after Beatrice's death. In Pound's judgment-if one assumes that patterns of citation constitute judgment-the poems written about women other than Beatrice are Dante's most powerful lyrics, despite the greater visibility of the poems about Beatrice given their placement in the Vita Nuova. Because Pound like Dante assigns love a force in this world, it is not "l'amore che move il sole e l'altre stelle" that interests Pound; it is "Veggio ne gli occhi de la donna mia/un lume pien di spiriti d'amore." But Pound nonetheless-like Dante in the Convivio-assigns this earthly love a social role. The lyric impulse and the political impulse are powerful forces in Pound, as they were in Dan te. Just as Dante infused his lyrics with social concerns, so did Pound. Pound's epic therefore ends echoing the dialectical twists and turns of Dante's entire oeuvre, not the relative coherence of the Commedia.

University of New Mexico, Albuquerque

1 Key texts here include Pearlman, Wilhelm, and Sicari. Stoicheff consistently refers to the Late Cantos as "The Cantos paradise" (30, 101, passim).

2 See Stoicheff for the most complete discussion of the complex history that led to Drafts & Fragments and the multiple ends of the poem. Bush also has a good discussion of the textual complexity of Drafts & Fragments (128-33).

3 See "Dante's Hell and Pound's Paradise," Imitating the Italians (esp. 116-19 and 209-17), and "Why the Commedia Is Not the Model for the Cantos and What Is."

4 Citations from The Cantos of Ezra Pound are by canto number and then page, as is customary in Pound scholarship.