W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and the Poetry of Paradise - Sean Pryor
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W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound,
and the Poetry of Paradise
Sean PryorW.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise
For Sal
W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound
and the Poetry of Paradise
Sean Pryor
University of New South Wales, Australia© Sean Pryor 2011
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
Sean Pryor has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be
identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Pryor, Sean.
W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the poetry of paradise.
1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Pound,
Ezra, 1885–1972 – Criticism and interpretation. 3. Poetics. 4. Modernism (Literature)
I. Title
821.9’1209-dc22
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Pryor, Sean.
W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the poetry of paradise / by Sean Pryor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-0660-0 (alk. paper)
1. Yeats, W. B. (William Butler), 1865–1939—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Pound,
Ezra, 1885–1972—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Paradise in literature. 4. American
poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 5. Modernism (Literature). I. Title.
PR5907.P79 2011
821’.8—dc22
2010036787
ISBN: 9781409406600 (hbk)
ISBN: 9781409429043 (ebk)
XVContents Preface vii Acknowledgements ix Note on the Texts xi List of Abbreviations xiii 1 The Old Commandment 1 2 Embarking for Cythera 35 3 Hollow Lands and Holy Lands 79 4 Shut Gardens 117 5 Ever Turning Other Worlds 163 Bibliography 203 Index 217
This page has been left blank intentionally
Preface
‘My dear Ezra’, wrote Yeats to Pound on 23 November 1919, ‘Criticism is the way
to a short & miserable life and certainly my lecture will contain none’ – not the
most encouraging words for a critic! Dangers do lie in wait for someone wanting
to write a book like this. There are already many fine studies of both poets, who
have been lucky to attract such gifted scholars. This is daunting company. And it
is not possible to give an exhaustive account of two bodies of work this large, this
diverse and this complex; the choices I have made will not please every reader. I
am well aware that I have only traced a thread in that sprawling tapestry, but I hope
it is a thread worth seeing.
Yeats and Pound were good friends, but this is not a study of their influence
on each other. Nor do I begin with Yeats’s first writings in the late 1880s and,
moving through a strict chronology, end with Pound’s final poems in the 1960s.
Instead I roughly chart their journeys in parallel. After a first chapter establishing
the terms of their quest for a poetry of paradise and exploring its heritage in the
Romantics and Victorians, my second chapter treats both writers’ early works. The
third chapter examines Yeats’s poetry from the 1910s to the early 1930s, while the
fourth addresses Pound’s poetry of the 1930s and 1940s. The final chapter looks
at the two friends’ late works together. I hope that this structure helps to bring out
affinities and correspondences which might otherwise go unnoticed.
Despite Yeats’s warning my experience in writing this book has been
overwhelmingly a pleasure, and for this I have many people to thank. I am
especially indebted to David Trotter for his deep critical insight and wisdom.
Without his support, generously given over many years, this book would not have
happened. For invaluable advice and encouragement I would also like to thank
Ron Bush, Mark Byron, Nicholas Cranfield, Heather Glen, Emma Jones, Henrik
Latter, Angela Leighton, Fiona McFarlane, Julian Murphet, Keiko Nowacka, Ian
Patterson, Adrian Phoon, Joseph Rosenberg and Jan Schramm. The Master and
Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, generously supported this work during
its doctoral phase, and the project was finished during a postdoctoral fellowship
kindly provided by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New
South Wales. The staff of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale
University and of the Houghton Library at Harvard University were remarkably
understanding and helpful. Finally, my deepest thanks go to my parents and my
sister, Shefali.
This book is for Sally Smith, who knows what it means to set out on long
journeys, to discover yourself in places and in ways you could not have anticipated,
and to do so together.This page has been left blank intentionally
Acknowledgements
A version of a part of my second chapter appeared in Insistent Images, ed. Elżbieta
Tabakowska, Christina Ljungberg and Olga Fischer (Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
2007), pp. 91–102. This material is reprinted with the kind permission of John
Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam and Philadelphia. A version of a part
of the fifth chapter appeared in Paideuma 36.1–2 (2007–2009); and a version of a
part of the second chapter appeared in Paideuma 37.1–2 (2010). I am thankful to
the editors of Paideuma for permission to recast material from these articles.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Faber and Faber Ltd, for permission
to quote from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, and to A P Watt Ltd, on behalf of
Gráinne Yeats, for permission to quote from the poetry of W. B. Yeats. Previously
unpublished material by Ezra Pound is copyright © 2010 by Mary de Rachewiltz
and Omar S. Pound. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
For permission to quote from the following poems, grateful acknowledgement is
also made:
‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and ‘The Tower’ reprinted with the permission of
Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Variorum Edition of the
Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright ©
1928 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1956 by Georgie Yeats.
All rights reserved.
‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ and ‘Byzantium’ reprinted with the permission
of Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Variorum Edition of
the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright ©
1933 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1961 by Bertha Georgie
Yeats. All rights reserved.
‘Ribh at the Tomb of Baile and Aillinn’ reprinted with the permission of
Scribner, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Variorum Edition of the
Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright ©
1934 by The Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1962 by Bertha Georgie
Yeats. All rights reserved.
‘John Kinsella’s Lament for Mrs. Mary Moore’, ‘Cuchulain Comforted’
and ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’ reprinted with the permission of Scribner, a
Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., from The Variorum Edition of the Poems of
W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach. Copyright © 1934 by The
Macmillan Company; copyright renewed © 1962 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. All
rights reserved.This page has been left blank intentionally
Note on the Texts
Except where noted, the texts of Yeats’s poems are taken from the corrected third
printing of The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt
and Russell K. Alspach (New York: Macmillan, 1966). For Yeats’s plays I use
The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, edited by Russell K. Alspach
(London: Macmillan, 1966). Line numbers for both poems and plays are cited
parenthetically. For the text of The Cantos I use the most recent edition (New
York: New Directions, 1996), with canto and page numbers cited parenthetically.
Quotations from manuscripts held in the Ezra Pound Papers (MSS 43) in the
Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript
Library, Yale University, are cited in the notes as ‘Ezra Pound Papers’, followed
by the number of the series, box and folder in which the item can be found. For
example, the first drafts of Canto XVII, which are held in Series IV, box 71, folder
3174, are cited as ‘Ezra Pound Papers (IV.71.3174)’. Manuscripts held in other
collections at the Beinecke and in other libraries are cited in full.This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Abbreviations Cav Ezra Pound, Pound’s Cavalcanti: An Edition of the Translations, Notes, and Essays, ed. David Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). CL1, 2, 3 W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats: Vol. I, 1865–1895, ed. John Kelly and Eric Domville; Vol. II, 1896–1900, ed. Warwick Gould, John Kelly and Deirdre Toomey; and Vol. III, 1901–1904, ed. John Kelly and Ronald Schuchard (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986, 1997, 1994). CL InteLex W. B. Yeats, The Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, general ed. John Kelly (Oxford: Oxford University Press [InteLex Electronic Edition], 2002). Letters cited by accession number. EE W. B. Yeats, Early Essays, ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finneran, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, iv (New York: Scribner, 2007). GK Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; repr. London: Peter Owen, 1966). P Ezra Pound, Personæ: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, ed. Lea Baechler and A. Walton Litz, rev. edn (New York: New Directions, 1990). PLE Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber, 1954). SL Ezra Pound, The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941, ed. D. D. Paige (1950; repr. London: Faber and Faber, 1971). SP Ezra Pound, Selected Prose, 1909–1965, ed. William Cookson (London: Faber and Faber, 1973). TMM W. B. Yeats, The Tower (1928): Manuscript Materials, ed. Richard J. Finneran, with Jared Curtis and Ann Saddlemyer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). VA W. B. Yeats, A Critical Edition of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), ed. George Mills Harper and Walter Kelly Hood (London: Macmillan, 1978). VB W. B. Yeats, A Vision (1937; repr. London: Macmillan, 1962). VP W. B. Yeats, The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats, edited by Peter Allt and Russell K. Alspach, corrected 3rd printing (New York: Macmillan, 1966). YLE W. B. Yeats, Later Essays, ed. William H. O’Donnell, with assistance from Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, v (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1994).
This page has been left blank intentionally
Chapter 1
The Old Commandment
Poetry concerns itself with the creation of Paradises. I use the word in plural for
there are as many paradises as there are individual men – nay – as many as there
are separate feelings.
—J. B. Yeats to W. B. Yeats, 10 May 1914
I’ve been about a bit and I know paradise when I see it.
—Ezra Pound to H. D., from the Hotel Eden, Sirmione, May 1910
When, in An Apology for Poetry, Sidney considers the names that have been given
to poets through the ages, he remembers that the Romans called a poet vates and
that the Greeks gave us our word poet. As Sidney explains, the Roman name
establishes the poet as a recipient of divine inspiration, as ‘a diviner, foreseer, or
prophet’; it celebrates the poet as a medium for the gods, the voice of the heavens.
Sidney commends the Romans for having bestowed on poets ‘so heavenly a title’.
In turn, the Greek name ‘cometh of this word poiein, which is “to make”’, and
this name is matched by the English term makers, a ‘high and incomparable’ title.
Philosophers, astronomers, physicians and lawyers, says Sidney, are shackled to
nature, which has already been made. But a poet, a maker, is different:
Only the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the
vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making
things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never
were in Nature, as the Heroes, Demigods, Cyclops, Chimeras, Furies, and such
like: so as he goeth hand in hand with Nature, not enclosed within the narrow
warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit.
Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have
done; neither with pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor
whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is
brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
J. B. Yeats, Letters to His Son W. B. Yeats and Others, 1862–1922, ed. Joseph Hone
(London: Faber and Faber, 1944), p. 179.
Noel Stock, The Life of Ezra Pound, rev. edn (San Francisco: North Point, 1982),
pp. 84, 87.
Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or, The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey
Shepherd, 3rd edn, rev. R. W. Maslen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002),
pp. 83–5. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise
Sidney’s verb deliver is characteristically deft, since, meaning both convey and
produce, it allows for both those ancient conceptions of the poet. So does the
noun invention: the poet who dreams things up out of nothing also discovers
them, comes upon them (in + venire, to come). Sidney happily declines to choose
between these conceptions, between medium and creator, the poet as oracle and
the poet as god. Catching the ambiguity helps us to see what a remarkable and
difficult claim Sidney is making. Poetry, he promises, delivers a golden world,
gaining paradise.
This promise animates the poetry of Yeats and Pound. It can be a wistful hope
or a tantalizing possibility, an idle daydream or a brazen ambition. I want to trace
the promise as it weaves in and out of their poems – ‘to affirm the gold thread in
the pattern’ (CXVI/817), as Pound writes in a late canto. This gold thread does not
appear in every poem that the two poets write; it is like the thin golden halo which
makes a figure a saint, transforming the whole.
Over two centuries after Sidney wrote his Apology, Blake declared his work
to be ‘an endeavour to restore what the Ancients called the golden age’. The shift
from Sidney’s golden world to a golden age accompanies a shift from deliver
to restore and emphasises a sense of nostalgia. If Sidney makes it seem that
poetry easily and inevitably delivers paradise, Blake allows room for struggle: his
‘endeavour’ may never be fulfilled. Another of Pound’s late cantos laments the
failure of just such an endeavour, while at the same time vindicating the effort: ‘I
tried to make a paradiso / terrestre’ (Notes for CXVII et seq./822). The pride of
Pound’s make, recalling Sidney’s maker, accompanies the fall of failure, which is
also the fall across the line break from the paradisal to the earthly. Finally, as if
surveying all this promise and disappointment, Yeats reflects with rueful pride that
‘We artists have taken over-much to heart that old commandment about seeking
after the Kingdom of Heaven’ (EE 197).
Though each of these formulations of the function of poetry has its particular
emphases, each implies that poetry itself could be a paradise. At its boldest, the
logic is this: Sidney boasts that poets deliver a golden world and, since poets
deliver poetry, poetry must be that golden world. Blake’s work constitutes a
golden age. Pound’s poetry literally makes an earthly paradise. Yeats strives for
that masterpiece which is the Kingdom of Heaven. The quest to deliver paradise
means more, therefore, than merely describing it. There is a subtler, more ambitious
quest. It may be felt in the difference between the strong, transitive sense of
Pound’s famous phrase ‘to write Paradise’ (Notes for CXVII et seq./822) and the
weaker phrase he could so easily have used: ‘to write about paradise’. A poem may
describe paradise without ever delivering it. Perhaps a poem may deliver paradise
without ever describing it.
William Blake, The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical,
ed. Edwin John Ellis and W. B. Yeats, 3 vols (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1893), ii, 393.
All subsequent quotations are from this edition, with line numbers cited parenthetically.The Old Commandment
For Yeats and Pound, two radical possibilities compel the poetic quest to
deliver paradise. The first is that, potentially, all poetry is paradise. That is, the
linguistic form of poetry, independent of its content, is a paradise. The second is
that, potentially, every paradise is poetry. That is, any attempt to imagine a paradise
is essentially poetic, rather than, say, essentially religious or philosophical. Put
less boldly, the works of Yeats and Pound dream that poetry had, has or might have
some intimate, definitive connection with paradise.
We can reformulate the quest as a pair of questions. First, what kind of poetry
is paradise? This is to ask about what kinds of poetry we imagine being made in
paradise, coming to us from paradise or constituting paradise itself. Second, what
kind of paradise is poetry? This is to ask what sort of blissful realm, condition
or experience poetry offers. These questions are inseparable; together they are
like the serpent which swallows its tail. The quest to deliver paradise is therefore
paradoxical; it is at once self-defeating and self-fulfilling. One might say that
Yeats and Pound seek the poetry of paradise, which is the paradise of poetry. The
fascination of the quest lies in the intricate ramifications of that of – poetry about
paradise, poetry belonging to paradise, and the paradise which poetry is.
Paradises, Plural
A golden world, a paradiso terrestre and the Kingdom of Heaven: before setting
sail with Yeats and Pound, we need to decide how these realms are related and
whether paradise is a suitable general term. We also need to explore the literary,
mythological and religious background to their quest, and to see how this quest
arises from the works of Romantic and Victorian poets. In short, we need to
establish sea-marks for the journey.
Derived from an Old Iranian root, the Median word paridaeza signified an
enclosure of some sort (pari around + daiz- to build, heap up), and was broadly
applied to storage places, vineyards, orchards, stables and forests. The term
was then borrowed by the Babylonians, the Greeks and the Jews. Xenephon
uses the word παράδεισος to refer to the Persian kings’ private hunting parks
or pleasure grounds, and the Greeks came to employ the word for any enclosed
park. The Hebrew cognate pardēs describes the Persian king’s park in Nehemiah
2.8, the Preacher’s private gardens in Ecclesiastes 2.5, and the beloved, figured
as a garden or orchard, in Song of Songs 4.13. The Septuagint and the Vulgate
Old Testament extend this by employing παράδεισος and paradisus to refer to
the garden of Eden (Genesis 2.8: ‘καὶ ἐφύτευσεν κύριος ὁ θεὸς παράδεισον’,
‘plantaverat autem Dominus Deus paradisum voluptatis’). In the New Testament
the word comes to be interchangeable with the Greek οὐρανός and the Latin
Jan M. Bremmer, ‘The Birth of the Term “Paradise”’, in The Rise and Fall of the
Afterlife: The 1995 Read-Tuckwell Lectures at the University of Bristol (London: Routledge,
2002), pp. 109–27 (pp. 109–11).
Ibid., p. 114. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise
caelum, both of which mean the heavens, the celestial abode of the gods or God.
Thus, in 2 Corinthians 12.2–4 Paul speaks of a man who was taken up into ‘the
third heaven’ (‘τρίτου οὐρανοῦ’, ‘tertium caelum’) and then Paul calls this heaven
‘paradise’ (‘παράδεισον’, ‘paradisum’). In Luke 23.43 Christ promises the Good
Thief that ‘To day shalt thou be with me in paradise’ (‘σήμερον μετ’ ἐμοῦ ἔσῃ
ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ’, ‘hodie mecum eris in paradiso’). These ambiguities gave the
Church Fathers considerable trouble, since they make it difficult to separate Eden,
Abraham’s bosom and the new Jerusalem.
The Old English word for paradise – used, for instance, in the Old English
Genesis – was neorxnawang (first element unknown + wang, field). In English the
word paradise has served both for celestial heavens and earthly paradises since
the late twelfth century. To have to specify an earthly paradise is to feel one of
the word’s many ambiguities, encompassing such different realms and blisses.
And though the secular word paradise was made sacred by centuries of Judaeo-
Christian usage, it never quite lost touch with other worlds. In the early seventeenth
century it regained the sense of Near Eastern wildlife parks or pleasure grounds,
just as in Greek. Yeats refers explicitly to ‘the ancient Persian Paradise’ (VA 193)
in the first edition of A Vision (1926).
The root meaning of enclosure binds three basic archetypes of paradise.
There are the gardens: Eden, Elysium, the garden of the Hesperides. There are
the islands: the Isles of the Blessed, Avalon, Tír na nÓg. And there are the cities:
the new Jerusalem, Yeats’s Byzantium, Pound’s Ecbatana.10 Each archetype walls
out a wilderness beyond. A sense of enclosure means a sense of exclusion, and
the exclusion may be temporal as well as spatial: paradise is frequently either lost
or still to come. Finally, paradise may be permanent or temporary, an eternal or
an interim bliss. Sometimes, as for Dante, this is the distinction made between
heavenly and earthly paradises.
Yeats and Pound invoke and adapt a host of blissful times and places, and
they move freely from one to another. This freedom partly results from the ease
with which the typology of paradise allows different myths to be compared and
conflated. Garden paradises are frequently located on islands or on mountain
In addition, there are five instances of paradisus in the apocryphal book 2 Esdras
(4 Ezra in the Vulgate). Each instance is translated paradise in the King James Bible. Two
refer to the garden of Eden (3.6, 6.2). Another seems interchangeable with heaven (4.7–8).
A fourth refers to a future bliss (7.123 in the Vulgate; 7.53 in the King James Bible), while
the fifth refers to a future bliss which combines garden and city (8.52).
See Jean Delumeau, History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition
(1992), trans. Matthew O’Connell (New York: Continuum, 1995), pp. 29–30.
For general studies of the concept of paradise, see Delumeau, History of Paradise;
and Jeffrey Burton Russell, A History of Heaven: The Singing Silence (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1997).
10
For an account of garden and city as archetypes, see William Alexander McClung,
The Architecture of Paradise: Survivals of Eden and Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983).The Old Commandment
summits, while longing for a lost paradise often relocates that paradise in the future
as a hope, a possibility. There is an old tradition of intermingling and overlapping
paradises. The prophecy against the king of Tyre in Ezekiel 28.12–19 transforms
the Eden of Genesis, a garden of trees and rivers, into a realm of precious stones
atop ‘the holy mountain of God’ (28.14). Mixing past and future, earthly and
celestial, Milton uses the word paradise to refer to Eden, has Raphael promise
Adam other, ‘Heav’nly Paradises’, and describes the bliss which Jesus will bring
as the ‘eternal Paradise of rest’.11 Or take that moment when Christian and Hopeful
are about to enter the City, at the end of the first part of Pilgrim’s Progress, and
their guides pause to describe for them ‘the glory of the place’:
There, said they, is the Mount Sion, the heavenly Jerusalem, the inumerable
company of Angels, and the Spirits of Just Men made perfect: You are going
now, said they, to the Paradice of God, wherein you shall see the Tree of Life,
and eat of the never-fading fruits thereof.12
Bunyan’s synthesis of biblical passages, especially Hebrews 12.22–3 and
Revelation 2.7, multiplies the syntheses already at work within those texts. When,
in Revelation, John of Patmos promises the ‘tree of life, which is in the midst of
the paradise of God’, he incorporates Eden into his vision of the new Jerusalem.
Bunyan remains within the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but others reach out
suggestively to pagan mythologies. Atop the mountain of Purgatory, in the garden
of Eden, Dante pauses to speculate: ‘Those who in old times sang of the age of gold
and of its happy state perhaps dreamed on Parnassus of this place’ (Purgatorio,
28.139–41).13 The comparison is two-fold, for Dante rhymes Eden with the golden
age and he rhymes the mountain of Purgatory with Mount Parnassus, thereby
binding paradise to poetry. After Dante, as Angelo Bartlett Giamatti writes,
‘Christian poets plundered Elysium to decorate the earthly paradise.’14 This was
true of heavenly paradises too. Milton’s Raphael foretells that after the apocalypse
the just will live in ‘golden days’ (Paradise Lost, 3.337); falling from heaven
his Satan cries ‘Farewel happy Fields / Where Joy for ever dwells’ (1.249–50);
and in that heaven grow ‘Elisian Flours’ (3.359). As Satan descends through the
heavens to earth, he passes through worlds which seem like ‘happy Iles, / Like
11
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007),
3.354, 5.500, 12.314. All subsequent quotations are from this edition, with line numbers
cited parenthetically.
12
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. N. H. Keeble (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984), p. 130.
13
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. John D. Sinclair, 3 vols (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1939–1948), ii, 370–71. All subsequent quotations are from this
edition, with line numbers cited parenthetically. In the original: ‘Quelli ch’anticamente
poetaro / l’età dell’oro e suo stato felice, / forse in Parnaso esto loco sognaro.’
14
Angelo Bartlett Giamatti, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (1966;
repr. New York: Norton, 1989), p. 15. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise
those Hesperian Gardens fam’d of old, / Fortunate Fields, and Groves, and flourie
Vales’ (3.567–9).
The rapid association or conflation of diverse paradises can be dizzying. Had
either Yeats or Pound – perhaps one morning in the reading room of the British
Museum – sought clarification in the entry for ‘Paradise’ in the ninth volume of the
Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics (1908), they would have found themselves
promptly redirected to ‘Blest, Abode of the’. There they would have found, not
a simple single definition, but extensive articles treating the theme of a happy
otherworld in, and tracing parallels between, Buddhist, Celtic, Christian, Egyptian,
Greek and Roman, Hindu, Japanese, Persian, Semitic, Slavonic and Teutonic
traditions.15 The much briefer entry for ‘Paradise’ in the eleventh edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica (1910–1911) restricts itself to the Judaeo-Christian
tradition and yet, still overlapping archetypes, its primary argument is that the
garden of Eden was originally a heavenly paradise, later transferred to earth.16
Some sense of the freedom with which Yeats and Pound approach the
mythologies and terminologies of paradise can be seen in a project which Yeats
began in the summer of 1936. Seeking a design for a picture to be embroidered by
his sister Lily, Yeats wrote to the young artist Diana Murphy:
I want to get for her a design representing Tir n’an Og, which means as I daresay
you know, the Country of the Young. It was the old Irish pagan paradise and is
generally supposed to be an island. The thing I have in mind is an Irish equivalent
to those Chinese pictures of the land of the Gods. (CL InteLex 6620)17
In time Yeats proposed a series of designs, each of which was ‘to picture an ideal
country’ and each of which was to illustrate a paradisal poem: ‘The Lake Isle of
Innisfree’ (1890), ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ (1897), ‘The Happy Townland’
(1903), ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ (1927) and ‘Byzantium’ (1932) (CL InteLex 7033,
7034, 7359). It is rather as if – despite their many differences – Innisfree, the
Country of the Young, the Chinese land of the gods, and the holy city of Byzantium
were corners of the one garden.
I use the term paradise, then, to encompass a ‘rich tapestry’ of myths and
beliefs, which Yeats and Pound inherit. It seems a better term than heaven, which
may be modified to heaven on earth but which can also mean Providence or God’s
law. One might choose the otherworldly, the supernatural or the divine, but the
experience of these is not necessarily desirable. Furthermore, paradise is the word
which Pound employs most often. Though Yeats uses it sparingly, this is for good
reason, and he does turn to it at certain key moments.
15
James Hastings and others, Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, 13 vols
(Edinburgh: T. & C. Clark, 1908–1926), ii, 680–710.
16
The Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edn, 29 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1910–1911), xx, 751–2. Yeats owned both these encyclopaedias; see Edward O’Shea,
A Descriptive Catalog of W. B. Yeats’s Library (New York: Garland, 1985), pp. 90–91, 121.
17
Yeats later described the project in On the Boiler (1939) (YLE 249).The Old Commandment
Roughly speaking, and to borrow the title of Yeats’s 1894 play, paradise for
both poets is a land of heart’s desire. It is a blissful realm or state. Though there
is some synthesis and slippage, their paradises are more earthly than celestial. On
the other hand, their paradises almost always involve some divine or supernatural
aspect. (There is little slippage between paradise and utopia.) To define their
paradises more exactly would be to cut a section from the tapestry which Yeats
and Pound weave. Because any paradise is a world beyond our experience, no
precise or stable definition may be possible. This in itself defines paradise, or our
relationship to it. At the same time, we can only imagine paradise in terms of our
experience, speculatively transforming or perfecting earthly desires and blisses. In
A Book Concerning Long Life (1567) Paracelsus ventures to define the immortality
we enjoy in paradise and then cuts himself short:
But to write much about this belongs not to our experience, beyond what the
earthly essence teaches, which affords a centre. Nor ought we to discuss at
length about these matters, since they far exceed our imagination, and every
faculty which seeks to learn whilst on earth the order of Paradise. We speak of
these things after a spiritual manner, rather in a dream than waking, and only for
this reason to shew that the life there is enduring, up to the consummation, or
perhaps beyond it, but this is to us occult.18
This quality of otherness is fundamental to the archetype of paradise, and to
Yeats’s and Pound’s poetic quest to deliver paradise. Paradise necessarily exceeds
our reach, whether spatially, temporally, conceptually, linguistically, poetically or
in some other fashion. Perhaps no more than a mirage on the horizon, paradise has
to be desired and imagined.
Fictions
A plethora of paradises greeted Romantic and Victorian poets – past and future,
earthly and celestial, Christian and pagan.19 One myth seems almost inevitably
to call to mind another. The way Milton glides from the Happy Isles, through
Hesperian gardens, to Fortunate Fields and flowery vales is typical. Consider,
for example, Wordsworth’s ‘Prospectus’ to The Recluse, in the preface to The
Excursion (1814):
18
Paracelsus, The Hermetic and Alchemical Writings of Aureolus Philippus
Theophrastus Bombast of Hohenheim, Called Paracelsus the Great, ed. and trans.
Arthur Edward White, 2 vols (London: James Elliott, 1894), ii, 116. Yeats owned this
edition (O’Shea, A Descriptive Catalog, p. 201). In 1909 Pound published his short poem
‘Paracelsus in excelsis’ (P 30–31).
19
See Michael Wheeler, Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), pp. 119–74. W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise
Paradise, and groves
Elysian, Fortunate Fields – like those of old
Sought in the Atlantic Main – why should they be
A history only of departed things,
Or a mere fiction of what never was?
For the discerning intellect of Man,
When wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion, shall find these
A simple produce of the common day.
– I, long before the blissful hour arrives,
Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse
Of this great consummation.20
As it happens, we can be fairly sure that Yeats and Pound read the ‘Prospectus’
together. In 1915 the two poets wintered in Stone Cottage, in Sussex, and that
January Yeats wrote to his father that they had ‘just started to read through the
whole seven vols of Wordsworth in Dowden’s edition’. His impression was of a
Wordsworth ‘continually looking back upon a lost vision, a lost happiness’ (CL
InteLex 2583). Yeats also told his father that before reading The Prelude they
began with The Excursion, which means that at the beginning of the long journey
through those seven volumes they would have encountered these lines.21
Wordsworth’s catalogue of paradises is, in a sense, an exercise in comparative
mythology. Such broad-ranging comparisons between art, myth and religion
across history and across cultures appealed to both Yeats and Pound. One of the
key influences on The Wanderings of Oisin (1889), Yeats’s early long poem about
a journey to three island paradises, was the Transactions of the Ossianic Society,
a series of six volumes published in Dublin between 1853 and 1861 (CL1 176).
The Transactions presented facing-page translations of Old Irish poems and sagas,
and engaged in a nationalist campaign to promote Irish literature. To this end the
editors established parallels between Irish myths and their Greek, Roman and
biblical counterparts; in borrowing authority from more respectable traditions
they fostered a typological approach. Thus, in his introduction to the first volume,
Nicholas O’Kearney refers to Tír na nÓg as ‘the Elysium of the pagan Irish’
and identifies it with ‘the Islands of the Happy of eastern writers’.22 Yeats later
read Alfred Nutt’s extensive essay on ‘The Happy Otherworld in the Mythico-
Romantic Literature of the Irish’ (1895). Nutt ranges widely across paradises past,
present and future, and across paradises underground, over the seas and in the
20
William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. Edward
Dowden, 7 vols (London: George Bell & Sons, 1892–1893), vi, 6–7. Unless otherwise noted,
all subsequent quotations are from this edition, with line numbers cited parenthetically.
21
Pound remembers their reading Wordsworth in The Pisan Cantos (LXXXIII/554).
22
See Nicholas O’Kearney, ed., The Battle of Gabhra: Garristown in the County of
Dublin, Fought A.D. 283, The Transactions of the Ossianic Society, i (Dublin: John O’Daly,
1853), p. 21. Similarly, the narrator in Yeats’s ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ (1897) aligns
‘the Islands of the Young’ with ‘the Happy Islands where the Gaelic heroes live the lives
of Homer’s Phaeacians’; see W. B. Yeats, Mythologies, ed. Warwick Gould and Deirdre
Toomey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 202.The Old Commandment
skies.23 He travels from Tír na nÓg, Tír Tairngiri (the Land of Promise) and Tír
inna Béo (the Land of the Living) to the Norse Valhalla, the Christian heaven, the
garden of Eden, Hesiod’s golden age, Homer’s Elysium and happy otherworlds
from Iranian and Indian myth. In a characteristic comparison, he argues that ‘the
term tir tairngiri […] designates at once the promised land of Canaan, flowing
with milk and honey, and the heavenly kingdom’.24
Broad surveys across histories and cultures are central to Pound’s project too.
To take perhaps the most obvious example, The Cantos overlays the journeys of
Odysseus, Aeneas and Dante, and thereby overlays Ithaca, Rome and the Christian
heaven as paradisal destinations. These journeys are then associated with the quest
for Eleusinian illumination and the Neoplatonic ascent to the Nous. In turn, these
religious traditions are set alongside Confucian philosophy and the beliefs of the
Na-khi. Recognizing Pound’s urge to compare and conflate, Peter Liebregts coins
an appropriately multifaceted adjective for The Cantos: ‘Ovidian-Dantesque-
Odyssean-Confucian-Neoplatonist’.25 This juxtaposition of distinct mythological,
religious and philosophical systems, and the implication of some common theme,
goal or truth, is one important consequence of Pound’s ideogrammic method.
Yet in Wordsworth’s ‘Prospectus’ comparative mythology threatens to make
terms such as paradise and myths such as Elysium seem merely arbitrary, merely
figurative. This is a danger to any such broad survey. Those groves and fields and
far-flung islands seem interchangeable, and that can make each paradise seem
unreal. It is worth comparing the ‘Prospectus’ with a passage in Wallace Stevens’s
‘Sunday Morning’ (1923):
There is not any haunt of prophesy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures.26
23
Similarly, in his notes to Lady Gregory’s Visions and Beliefs in the West of Ireland
(1920) Yeats explains that ‘Tir-na-n-og, the country of the young, the paradise of the ancient
Irish […] is sometimes described as under the earth, sometimes all about us, and sometimes
as an enchanted island’ (YLE 278).
24
Alfred Nutt, ‘The Happy Otherworld in the Mythico-Romantic Literature of the
Irish’, in Kuno Meyer and Alfred Nutt, The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of
the Living, 2 vols (London: David Nutt, 1895), i, 101–331 (pp. 226–7). Yeats specifically
remarked on Nutt’s comparative approach when reviewing the book; see W. B. Yeats,
Early Articles and Reviews: Uncollected Articles and Reviews Written Between 1886 and
1900, ed. John P. Frayne and Madeleine Marcheterre, The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats,
ix (New York Scribner, 2004), pp. 415–17.
25
Peter Liebregts, Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson
University Press, 2004), p. 115.
26
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America,
1997), p. 54.10 W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and the Poetry of Paradise
There is gentle mockery in the dismissive ‘any old’, the too poetical inversion
‘isle / Melodious’, the archaic ‘gat’ and the bathetic ‘hill’. Like Wordsworth,
Stevens enjoys the effect of spilling from paradise to paradise. He then rejects
anachronistic, fictive paradises for the common day of April’s green. But though
Wordsworth questions them, he will not give them up.
This does not mean that Wordsworth reverts to uncritical or unambiguous
belief. Instead, the Romantics interrogate belief in paradise and belief itself.
They set the vocabularies of paradise free and blur the boundaries between art
and religion. Shelley describes the garden in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ (1820) by
overlaying references to paradise, Elysium, Eden and heaven (1.58, 1.108, 2.2,
2.10).27 Yeats adds yet another layer when, quoting from the poem in his 1933 essay
on Prometheus Unbound (1820), he links Shelley’s garden to Tír na nÓg (YLE
118). There is no hierarchy, such as in Dante or Milton, to Shelley’s references
or Yeats’s gloss; no hierarchy differentiates the true from the false or fictive (or
the Christian from the pagan). Like Wordsworth’s catalogue, the juxtapositions
serve to render each paradise figurative. The problem, then, is what to make of
figuration, of ‘mere fiction’. In fact, there is something conspicuously figurative
about the promise to deliver paradise. Sidney speaks of a golden age, while Pound
writes of a paradiso terrestre. Blake seeks ‘what the Ancients called the golden
age’, explicitly allowing for other names, other figures.
When the fairy in Queen Mab (1813) promises that a ‘garden shall arise, in
loveliness / Surpassing fabled Eden’ (4.88–9), the sense of fabrication in ‘fabled’
seems loosely pejorative. But Shelley more often embraces fable and figuration.
Like Sidney, Shelley promises that poetry has in the past delivered and might again
deliver paradise. Thus, in A Defence of Poetry (1821) he celebrates the flowering
of chivalric poetry in the Middle Ages:
The familiar appearance and proceedings of life became wonderful and heavenly;
and a paradise was created as out of the wrecks of Eden. And as this creation
itself is poetry, so its creators were poets; and language was the instrument of
their art.28
To say ‘a paradise as out of’ is to offer two figures ambiguously joined. To say ‘as
out of the wrecks of Eden’, to play metaphorically on the solemn religious belief,
is to wreck Eden. What Shelley calls creation out of the wrecks of Eden is what
any Romantic, Victorian or modernist must do – create belatedly, figuratively.
Every attempt to imagine paradise must trope upon the inherited tapestry of fables
and beliefs.
27
Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: Authoritative Texts, Criticism,
ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 286–95. All
subsequent quotations are from this edition, with line numbers cited parenthetically.
28
Ibid., p. 525.You can also read
