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

"Monna Vanna" is an endearing diminutive for the beloved of Guido Cavalcanti. In Vita Nuova Dante has a dream in which it is explained that Giovanna has been given the name Primavera because she is the precursor ("she will come first") of the lady Beatrice. The last words-"tu mi fai remembrar," [sic] "you make me recall"-are from Purgalorio XXVIII where, standing in the earthly paradise, Dante addresses Matelda. (178)19

But it is Cavalcanti's beloved-not Beatrice-who calls on Pound's memory here, and the turn, not just back to the Earthly Paradise, but all the way back to the streets of Florence, is representative of Pound's approach to paradise. We can't take either the movement of Canto 93 per se or of some larger unit of the Cantos or of the whole poem as reflective of Dante's turn to sacred love and Paradise. Pound instead writes against that pattern, juxtaposing different texts by Dante to other texts from Dante's time in a manner that prevents any "orderly Dantescan rising." We begin this group of cantos with an invocation of Queen Cytherea and end with an address to Monna Vanna, interesting inhabitants of Paradise indeed. Beatrice, in contrast, goes unmentioned in The Cantos, and the only references to the Vita Nuova in the poem are this one and another reference (76/452) to Cavalcanti's donna.

If this is Pound's paradiso, we need to understand that Pound is citing from a range of Dante's texts not to strengthen the formal or thematic resemblance to Dante's Paradiso but rather to display the aspect of Dante's paradise that is of value for him. The variation in denizens of paradise is intentional here, and we should attend to it. First, Dante's separation of varieties of love into sacred love-the poetry of Folquet, the love for Beatrice-and profane love-the poetry of Bernart de Ventadorn and Cavalcanti's love for Monna Vanna-does not work for Pound. Second, for Pound, paradise is not a theological construct, it is a civic one. The conversation between Charles Martel and Dante in Paradiso VlII about the value of citizenship is clearly on Pound's mind here:

And the cause of that civility for Pound is specified a little later, when Pound quotes the passage from the Convivio (derived from Aristotle) about "compagnevole animale" (Convivio IV.iv.2; Ryan 127). "Men are naturally friendly," as Pound translates it himself on the same page (93/626).

Pound is not here identifying Dante with theological orthodoxy and endorsing Cavalcanti as a heretical alternative in the way he did around 1930;2" instead, he is culling from Dante a Dante focused on this world and on concerns Pound can endorse and celebrate. Canto 93 is one of the last cantos in Rock-Drill (85-95), and the title of the next section of The Cantos, Thrones, is yet another reference to the civic aspect of the Paradiso. As Pound himself explained to Donald Hall in 1960:

The thrones in Dante's Paradisoare for the spirits of the people who have been responsible for good government. The thrones in the Cantos are an attempt to move out from egoism and to establish some definition of an order possible or at any rate conceivable on earth. (qtd. in Makin, Pound's Cantos 276)