special issue: thomas kinsella || thomas kinsella and the pound legacy: his jacket on the cantos

Thomas Kinsella and the Pound Legacy: His Jacket on the CantosAuthor(s): Alex DavisSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 31, No. 1, Special Issue: Thomas Kinsella (Spring -Summer, 2001), pp. 38-53Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25517149 .

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Alex Davis

Thomas Kinsella and the Pound

Legacy: His Jacket on the Cantos

It is by now a critical commonplace to argue that with Nightwalker and

Other Poems (1968), and to an even greater extent with Notes from the

Land of the Dead (1972), Kinsella's poetry becomes increasingly inflected

by the formal techniques of Anglo-American poetic modernism. What this observation leaves out of consideration is the fact that the title poem to Kinsella's 1962 collection, Downstream, identifies Ezra Pound's

presence in Kinsella's poetry as predating his exodus from W.H. Auden and the English lyric tradition, even though the poem apparently owes

nothing to Pound's imperative: 'To break the pentameter, that was the

first heave'.1

The West a fiery complex, the East a pearl, We gave our frail skiff to the hungry stream,

Ruffling the waters. Caught on a running swirl

Our gunwale dipped and steadied on the seam Of calm and current. I raised my chin to zip My jacket on the Cantos.2

'Downstream' charts a journey towards Durrow that concludes with the

speaker and his companion still 'Searching the darkness for a landing

place' (D, p. 56). The elusive goal to their quest, 'ancient' and 'gentle' Durrow, is imagined in terms which recall Austin Clarke's depiction of

the Celtic-Romanesque era in Pilgrimage, as 'An acre of abstract love and vanished skills, / Where teacher and saint declined in ghostly white' .3

But Clarke's 1929 collection is clearly not the book the speaker zips beneath his jacket: 'it is Pound or Dante ? Kinsella is deliberately vague', comments Brian John, 'although the terza rima maintained throughout further substantiates the analogy with Dante'.4 But the capitalization

?

'the Cantos' ? surely suggests Pound's epic is the volume carefully tucked

1. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), LXXX1, p. 553. Future references to this text will be incorporated parenthetically using the abbreviation Cantos.

2. Thomas Kinsella, Downstream (Dublin: Dolmen, 1962), p. 50. Future references to

this text will be incorporated parenthetically using the abbreviation D. 3. Austin Clarke, Later Poems (Dublin: Dolmen, 1961), p. 55. Compare the depiction of

Clonmacnoise in Clarke's 'Pilgrimage': 'those cloistered scholars,/ Whose knowl

edge of the gospel/ Is cast as metal in pure voices,/ Were all rejoicing daily' (p. 3). 4. Brian John, Reading the Ground: The Poetry of Thomas Kinsella (Washington, DC:

Catholic University of America Press, 1996), p. 64.

38



THOMAS KINSELLA AND THE POUND LEGACY

away, a point substantiated by Carolyn Rosenberg, to whom Kinsella

said that the allusion is to Pound's 'Chinese Cantos'.5

'Downstream' bears a superficial resemblance to aspects of the Cantos:

the Dantesque journey, as the speaker and his 'co-shadow' (D, p. 54)

'plung[e] deeper into Styx' (D, p. 53), vaguely recalls Pound's use of the

same motif, while the infernal passages 'Among nude herds of the

damned' (D, p. 54) are arguably indebted to the Hell Cantos. But the

admitted allusion to the China Cantos is curious. The China Cantos

comprise the first of two decads of cantos (the second is devoted to John

Adams) published together as Cantos LII-LXXI in 1940. These are among the driest of the Cantos, and mark a drastic change in the direction of

Pound's epic, as polyphony gives way to a monologic digest of imperial Chinese history from its origins to the eighteenth-century, Pound's

dogmatic concern with the nature of the ideal state directed by his

enthusiastic support for Mussolini's Italy. The China Cantos' exhaustive

roll-call of emperors is presumably referred to in those lines in

'Downstream' in which the speaker and his companion find themselves

'talking then/ Of Poetry':

I chose the silken kings,

Luminous with crisis, epochal men

Waging among the primal clarities Productive war. Spurred by the steely pen

To cleansing or didactic rages, these

Fed the stream in turn and deeper still Drove its course; then, fading by degrees,

They shed their natures on the growing chill.

I named them and the transitory eve

Returned their names with force and warmth until

The gathering shades beginning to deceive,

Night stole the princely scene. I closed the page And wiped the dewy cover on my sleeve. (D, p. 61 )6

Kinsella's speaker's animated response to these pages of the Cantos is, on the fact of it, surprising, given the poem's subsequent exploration of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Donald Davie found the China

5. Carolyn Rosenberg, 'Let Our Gaze Blaze: The Recent Poetry of Thomas Kinsella', Dissertation, Kent State University, 1980, p. 125.

6. The reference to 'the Cantos' is pruned from the revised and greatly shortened version of the poem, 'Downstream IF, in Thomas Kinsella, Nightwalker and Other Poems

(Dublin: Dolmen, 1968). In the most recent republication of the text it is reinstated: 'I

read a page/ Out of the Cantos, and the scroll of names/ Ascended in the half light,

silken kings/ Luminous with crisis'. Thomas Kinsella, Collected Poems 1956-1994

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 48.

39



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Cantos 'pathological and sterile';7 while Massimo Bacigalupo has called

them (in conjunction with the Adams Cantos) 'a glaring example of

regime art, or of what we could call "fascist realism"'.8 Though there is

little direct reference to Mussolini in Pound's roll-call of 'epochal men', the Duce and Italian fascism are central to the horizon of production of

these cantos ? as Canto LV makes explicit: 'TSONG of TANG put up

granaries/ somewhat like those you want to establish' (Cantos, p. 310); while LIV makes a 'subject rhyme' between the activities of the Emperor Han Sieun (73-48 BC) and a 1938 submarine display in the Bay of Naples

put on by Mussolini for the benefit of Hitler.9 The anti-Semitic cast to

Pound's economic beliefs is glaringly present in Canto LII, in which

'Remarked Ben [Franklin, not Benito Mussolini]: better keep out the jews / or yr/ grand children will curse you/ jews, real jews, chazims [pigs], and neschek [usury]' (Cantos, p. 267). In 'Downstream' the narrator recalls

the horror he felt on learning of the fascist death camps, their 'tall

chimneys flickering in their pall,' 'where rodents ply,/ Man rumped, sow-headed, busy with whip and maul// Among nude herds of the

damned' (D, p. 54). This infernal vista is set beside the poem's recurrent

vision of patterned order, the imagery of the latter reminiscent of the

pageant of 'silken kings':

It seemed that I, Coming to conscience on that lip of dread, Still dreamed, impervious to calamity,

Imagining a formal drift of the dead Stretched calm as effigies on velvet dust, Scattered on starlit slopes with arms

outspread

And eyes of silver ... when that story thrust

Pungent horror and an actual mess

Into my very face, and taste I must! (D, p. 54)

These lines address the importance of those 'accident[s]' of birth that

Kinsella spoke of to Philip Fried ? which include 'the accident of whether

the Second World War finds one at the age of 10 as an Irish person in

Ireland or a Jew in, say, Latvia'.10 What 'Downstream' makes clear is

7. Donald Davie, Studies in Ezra Pound: Chronicle and Polemic (Manchester: Carcanet,

1991), p. 137. 8. Massimo Bacigalupo, The Formed Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 98. 9. 'And the kings of Si-yu, that are from Tchang-ngan to the Caspian/ came into the

Empire/ to the joy of HAN SIEUN TI/ (Pretty manoeuvre but the technicians/ watched with their hair standing on end/ anno sixteen, Bay of Naples)' (Cantos,

p. 291). On this obscure 'rhyme', see Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1971), p. 435.

10. Thomas Kinsella, 'Omphalos of Scraps', Interview with Philip Fried, Manhattan

Review (Spring 1988), p. 9.

40




that, for the former individual, the latter's plight is an inescapable donne, 'an actual mess' that cannot be evaded by the post-war adult. The

dilemma faced by the poem is to what extent such 'horror' can be

accommodated to an adequate aesthetic: 'How the remote chaotic, far

outflung / In glittering waste, may shiver and become / A mesh or order,

every jewel strung!' (D, p. 53). Shortly before the war, Pound had

confronted a similar problem, to which Pere de Moyriac de Maille's vast

Histoire Generale de la Chine (1777-1783) seemed to provide an answer:

no volumes could have come more patly than did these to Ezra

Pound in Rapallo, 1938, to reactivate the Enlightenment rationalism he had secreted during the first war and was

drawing on once more

as war clouds darkened. To know clear principles in a time of

confusion, this is a great resource; to know that statecraft has

principles not beyond grasping, that action can be taken and men

(Mussolini) found capable of taking it, that history affords paradigm after paradigm.11

Thus observes Hugh Kenner; and Kinsella's speaker, as he closes the

China Cantos, would appear to be vouchsafed his own intimation of

order, as the shifting waters proffer the sense of pattern, of 'paradigm after paradigm':

Drifting to meet us on the darkening stage A pattern shivers; whirling in its place Another holds us in a living cage

And drifts to its reordered phase of grace; Was it not so? (D, p. 51)

The importance of these lines can be gauged from the fact that, slightly reworded, they introduce the revised version of the poem, 'Downstream

IF (included as a tailpiece to Nightwalker and Other Poems).11 Their

interpretative crux lies in how we relate them to the persona's naming aloud of the Chinese 'silken kings'. Do these shivering 'phase[s] of grace'

provide a natural correlative to the 'epochal men' whom, we are told,

'[Feed] the stream in turn and deeper still/ Drive its course' (D, p. 51)? This question leaches into the central problematic of Kinsella's poetry,

early and late: the relationship between poetic 'order' and the vagaries of lived experience. The hesitant question ('Was it not so?') suggests that

the Poundian heroes ? who, after all, are textual figures, 'paper beings'

? might no more 'Drive' the river than the female singer of Wallace

Stevens's 'The Idea of Order at Key West', 'order[s] words of the sea'

beside which she walks: 'It may be that in all her phrases stirred/ the

11. Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 434.

12. Kinsella, Nightwalker, p. 83.

41




grinding water and the gasping wind;/ But it was she and not the sea we heard'.13 Unlike Pound's China Cantos, 'Downstream' subjects to

quizzical scrutiny the sense of 'pattern' after which it nonetheless hankers.

The same intense self-reflexivity characterizes the later A Technical

Supplement (1976), which explores the demystifying ruthlessness of

'Enlightenment rationalism' from within a discourse coloured by that

tradition's spirit of coldly dispassionate enquiry. For Kinsella, as for the

eighteenth-century Diderot ? a quotation from whom comprises the

epigraph to A Technical Supplement ? there is order, but it is wrung from

disarray. As Kinsella said to Philip Fried: 'The poet's or artist's eliciting of order takes place on the basis of an offered disorder. It is something over which one has no control, and would not attempt to exercise

control'.14 Such 'disorder' might condemn twentieth-century poet or

eighteenth-century Encyclopedist to despair. As Diderot wrote to Voltaire:

There comes a time when all ashes are mingled. Then what will it boot me

to have been Voltaire or Diderot, or whether it is your three syllables or my

three syllables [or Kinsella's] that survive? One must work, one must be

useful, one owes an account of one's gifts, etcetera, etcetera. Be useful to

men! Is it quite clear that one does more than amuse them, and that there is much difference between the philosopher and the flute-player? They listen

to one and the other with pleasure or disdain and remain what they were.

The Athenians were never wickeder than in the time of Socrates, and perhaps all they

owe to his existence is a crime the more.15

Diderot's words on Socrates in Athens find a chime in Kinsella's depiction of Pound in Rapallo, in a review of Pound's Cantos that appeared in the same year as A Technical Supplement. Of the middle Cantos, Kinsella wrote:

'They reflect Pound's growing hysteria, and accordingly falter, as he takes on the whole wicked world single-handed during the 1930s and early 1940s; they reflect the disastrous changes in his circumstances which

brought him to a prison-cage in Pisa (where the poetry rises to a new

peak of feeling and eloquence)'.16 The qualifications in this passage are

crucial: Pound's faltering pre-war Cantos are succeeded by the magnifi cent poignancy of the Pisan Cantos, the product of his incarceration by the Allies in the Disciplinary Training Centre at Pisa. These latter poems derive from that 'perpetual alliance of enlightenment and suffering'

which Brian John identifies in A Technical Supplement,17 and which informs

poem I of that sequence:

13. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,

1954), p. 129.

14. Kinsella, Interview with Philip Fried, p. 15.

15. Kinsella, A Technical Supplement, Peppercanister 6 (Dublin: Peppercanister, 1976), no pagination.

16. Thomas Kinsella, 'So That:', Review of The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Hibernia, 4 June

1976, p. 23.

17. John, Reading the Ground, p. 179.

42




Blessed William Skullbullet

glaring from the furnace of your hair thou whose definitions

- whose insane nets -

plunge and convulse to hold thy furious catch let our gaze blaze, we pray, let us see how the whole thing

works

With A Technical Supplement we can see the effect upon Kinsella's poetic of formal possibilities offered by Pound's Cantos, though a crucial

difference between the two poets can be sensed in Kinsella's wariness

vis-a-vis the authority of the 'pattern' produced in the poetic act. Though Kinsella on occasion has been driven 'by the steely pen// To cleansing or

didactic rages' (most notably in his diatribe against the Widgery Tribunal

Report on Bloody Sunday in Butcher's Dozen [1972]),18 his poetry lacks

Pound's authoritarian certainty. The order elicited by the poet is always

provisional. In Kinsella's words: 'You are presented with the scraps, the

disordered, and you absorb it, process it, and it is absorbed, with luck, into some relationship with an idea of order.'19 The Stevensian concluding

phrase is telling, and signals a dimension to Kinsella's poetic sensibility that Hugh Kenner believes is responsible for his 'intensely solipsistic verse', and indicative of the plight of the contemporary Irish poet per se.20 For Kenner, Kinsella proceeds merely 'by indirections', that is, by

means of 'scrap[s]' of allusive matter, which supply 'the lack of some

moral emblem backed by a whole literature and culture'.21 Kenner's

disparagement of Kinsella's enterprise has been shrewdly countered by Daniel O'Hara, who contends that the absence of a 'modernist... sublime'

in Kinsella's poetry is a premeditated attempt 'to substitute his personal

phantasmagoria for the larger communal forms of the imagination that

have gone by the board'.22 In this respect, Kinsella's oeuvre recalls that

of Stevens more so than that of Pound or Yeats. Kenner notes ? in the

course of a notorious aside in The Pound Era ? that Stevens, in contrast

to Pound, 'concerned himself not at all with a paideuma'P So too, Kinsella's exacting attentiveness to the makeshift (or 'fictional', in

Stevens's parlance) quality of the structures the imagination constructs

eschews the totalizing aspirations of a poetic Kulturmophologie. The starlit

18. Thomas Kinsella, Butchers Dozen, Peppercanister 1 (Dublin: Peppercanister Press, 1972.

19. Kinsella, Interview with Philip Fried, p. 16.

20. Hugh Kenner, 'Thomas Kinsella: An Anecdote and Some Reflections', Genre, Vol.

12, No. 4 (1979), p. 599.

21. Ibid., p. 598.

22. Daniel O'Hara, 'Appropriate Performance: Thomas Kinsella and the Ordeal of

Understanding', in James D. Brophy and Raymond J. Porter (eds), Contemporary Irish Writing (Boston: Twayne, 1983), pp. 79, 70.

23. Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 517.

43




sky of 'Downstream' is such a structure, and one that Kinsella may have had in mind when, in the course of an exchange with a number of other

poets, he commented: 'in modern writing the stress is on personal versions of the world, in which basic things are worked out repeatedly as if for the first time, and there are no fixed stars'.24

The impact of Pound, alongside that of William Carlos Williams, on Kinsella's poetic is principally apparent in the disjunctive form of Notes and many of the subsequent Peppercanister sequences, such as The Good

Fight (1973) and One (1974); with Nightwalker and Other Poems appear ing, in retrospect, as a collection transitional between the 'closed' forms of Kinsella's early poetry and the more 'open' modes of writing he

developed during the second half of the nineteen sixties on.25 Though James Joyce is invoked in the course of the poem

? 'Watcher in the

tower, be with me now'26 ? and Finnegans Wake is alluded to,27 Kinsella's

intensely self-conscious nightwalker looks back to J. Alfred Prufrock as

well as Stephen Dedalus; and there are obvious resemblances between

the ruptured textual patina of the poem and that of The Waste Land.

But with Notes from the Land of the Dead, the disjunctions go further

than what Edna Longley dismissed as the 'Eliotish discontinuities of

"Nightwalker"'.28 In an interview with John Haffenden, Kinsella

explained that Pound and Williams 'opened up particular lines of style ? not by any means for imitation, but revelations of scope and attitude ? and (particularly in Williams's case) of a kind of creative relaxation in

the face of complex reality; to remain open, "prehensile", not rigidly committed'.29 In line with comments made elsewhere, Kinsella here

accords Williams the greater influence on the 'prehensile' poetic practice

inaugurated by ? in W.J. McCormack memorable formulation ? 'that

24. Thomas Kinsella, 'Poetry since Yeats: An Exchange of Views', Tri-Quarterly, No. 4

(1965), p. 108.

25. My distinction between 'open' and 'closed' verse is related to Charles Olson's

differentiation, in his essay, 'Projective Verse', of the 'projectile' and 'prospective' verse-forms of Pound and Williams from more conventional, lyric modes of poetry. See Charles Olson, Collected Prose, eds. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 239.

26. Kinsella, Nightwalker, p. 63. 27. The poem alludes to HCE in the initial letters of the line 'Hesitant, cogitating, exit'

(Nightwalker, p. 67), and quotes the Wake's account of Wellington's 'white harse, the

Cokenhape' (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake [London: Faber and Faber, 1939], p. 8) in

its derogatory description of Charles Haughey 'mounting to glory / On his big white

harse' (Nightwalker, p. 64). There are further references to the Wake in the phrases 'Father of Authors!' and 'sonhusband' (Nightwalker, p. 64); compare Joyce, p. 214

and p. 627.

28. Edna Longley, 'Searching the Darkness: Richard Murphy, Thomas Kinsella, John

Montague and James Simmons', in Douglas Dunn (ed.), Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey (Carcanet: Cheadle Hulme, 1975), p. 134.

29. Thomas Kinsella, Interview with John Haffenden, in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation

with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 106.

44




Red-Sea-dividing collection', Nightwalker and Other Poems.301 will return to Kinsella's qualifications of Pound's enterprise, and the importance of

Williams to Kinsella; for the present, one might note the fact that Williams's Paterson was itself made possible by the example of the Cantos'

'revelations of scope and attitude'.31 Kinsella's 1976 review of Pound's

poem suggests some of the possibilities it 'opened up' for his own work; his description of the anecdotal, elliptical and allusive bricolage of the Cantos seems, in no small part, pertinent to Notes and the ensuing Peppercanister publications:

Poetic progress is by juxtaposition: details, episodes and characters fuse or contrast; the conjunctions "And" and "So that" function like

strong verbs. Larger effects are organised by the "musical"

deployment and repetition of key phrases or scraps of action and

by control of the headlong energy from Canto to Canto, so that blocks of Cantos assemble and balance each other. Ezra Pound is himself

established as a character in the work ? most frequently as the artist

at his desk in the very act of discovery, then modulating into an observer seated on certain steps, overlooking

an arena in which

historic action is taking place; and so on. The "meaning" is a matter

of vortices eddying about us as we possess ourselves of the contents

of the poet's mind. Everything is dramatic and immediate, concerned

with ideas only in so far as they manifest themselves in action.32

Kinsella's strategies of juxtaposition, fusion and repetition, like Wil

liams's, ultimately derive from, though in neither case do they merely 'imitate', Pound's. The following extract from The Good Fight, Kinsella's

elegy for John F. Kennedy, shows the enabling impact of such procedures on Kinsella's poetic:

? Democracy cries out for

Tyranny; and the Tyrant becomes a

wolf instead of a man ...

The rest! The whole? The rest damned to a constant

world but one! An flux of pain and pleasure. They impossible logic-being. s truggle greedily for their

pleasures, and butt and kick with horns and hoofs of iron.

30. W.J. McCormack, 'Politics or Community: The Crux of Thomas Kinsella's Aesthetic

Development', Tracks, No. 7 (1987), p. 63.

31. Of the complex and agonistic relation of Williams's to Pound's verse epic, Michael

Bernstein judiciously remarks that 'Pound had decisively widened the domain of

poetry's rightful subject matter, and Williams was free to apply Pound's lessons to

areas of experience ignored in The Cantos themselves'. Williams's poem, while

undeniably an 'anti-Cantos' in its localist specificity, 'owes much' to Pound's

'astonishing expansion of the technical recourses of modern verse'. Michael Bernstein,

The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1980), pp. 197, 200.

32. Kinsella, 'So That:', p. 23.

45




man beast

(d)amn

best

mean

r i

team b a ns

XX

meat33

Kinsella here juxtaposes the words of Plato and Lee Harvey Oswald, whose jottings conclude the quotation, and provides his own baffled

and derisive commentary to the left of the found material. Though

compromised, the Kennedy of The Good Fight is a Kinsellan quester,

hoping to sound, in his words, 'the just note./ inside and out'.34 Yet, in

the lines quoted, the conjunction of the scribbling Oswald and the

annotating poet strikes an ominous chord. Such fusion of poet and

assassin is reinforced by the parallel between Oswald, in his 'lonely room', arranging his 'things' 'so that he can read and eat at the same

time'35 and the magus of Notes, his 'book propped before [him], eat[ing] forkfulls/ of scrambled egg'.36 Both figures are equally nightwalkers:

Oswald's literal 'night prowl'37 recalls the metaphorical'nightnothing' of

Notes, that psychic topography in which 'It was not Death, but Night (NP, p. 44). And both men thus take the reader back to the 'Nightwalker'

himself 'patrolling the hive of his brain'.38 There is a vertiginous effect

to reading these lines, as the 'meaning' elicited is produced by 'details,

episodes and characters' fusing or contrasting with one another. On a

larger scale, Kinsella's poetry since Nightwalker is conceived as a series

of 'blocks' or interconnected units: Notes opens with the concluding four

lines of'Phoenix Park', the final poem oi Nightwalker (NP, p. [8]);39 Out of Ireland (1987) takes as 'Precedents' quotations from A Selected Life (1972), 'Phoenix Park' and 'Nightwalker'; and, most recently, The Familiar (1999) reworks passages from the 'Invocation' to the Cuala Press edition of

Notes (1972). Such 'musical' deployment and repetition of key phrases

33. Thomas Kinsella, The Good Fight: A Poem for the Tenth Anniversary of the Death of John F. Kennedy, Peppercanister 4 (Dublin: Peppercanister, 1973), p. 15.

34. Ibid., p. 8.

35. Ibid., p. 11.

36. Thomas Kinsella, New Poems, 1973 (Dublin: Dolmen, 1973), p. 9. Future references

to this text will be incorporated parenthetically using the abbreviation NP.

37. Kinsella, The Good Fight, p. 12.

38. Kinsella, Nightwalker, p. 58. 39. Ibid., p. 82.

46




or scraps of action point to the shared importance of musical form to

Pound and Kinsella. Pound on a number of occasions loosely likened

the structure of the Cantos to that of a fugue,40 and a contrapuntal poetic is equally apparent in Kinsella's work from Nightwalker through the

Peppercanisters. In Out of Ireland, polyphony is not only heard in the

sequence's verbal approximation to counterpoint ?

through the citing of those 'Precedents' alongside new matter?but becomes an image for

cosmic order: 'the world's parts, / ... ill-fitted in their stresses and their

pains,/ ...

combining] at last in polyphonic sweet-breathing union'.41

As in the Cantos, the poet in Kinsella's series 'is himself established as a

character in the work': thus, the magus of Notes reappears in One, in

parodic guise, as 'a man, sporting a striped jacket,/ posed in confident

quackery, bearded' (like Kinsella).42 Kinsella's depiction of Pound

portraying himself 'as the artist at his desk in the very act of discovery' could equally describe the figures in 'Worker in Mirror, at his Bench' in

New Poems (NP, pp. 59-63) and 'Minstrel' in One. In short, Oswald's

anagrammatical wordplay in The Good Fight functions, in miniature, as

an expression of a poetic procedure which, though clearly not Imagist or even Vorticist in character, possesses an 'organization of forms' that

arguably has its distant origin in the 'intensive art' of Anglo-American

avant-gardism.43 The differential enters in the sense of culpability that

the poet's identification with Oswald necessarily entails. It is a tacit

admission of the egocentricity of the poet's rage for order, a theme which

finds its response in the poem's closing portrayal of Robert Frost 'in

disarray': 'Maybe if 1/ were to fumble through my papers again ..Z44

Kinsella signalled a debt to Pound in the penultimate poem in New

Poems 1973, in which Notes was collected: 'Wyncote, Pennsylvania: A

Gloss' depicts Kinsella at his desk in Pound's birthplace, poring over

'papers [that] seem luminous' (NP, p. 75). I am far from suggesting that

Kinsella's relationship with Pound is similar to that of the scribe glossing the master's work; rather, that Kinsella is the Irish poet of his generation

who most fully inherited what Marjorie Perloff calls

40. Take a fugue: theme, response, contrasujet. Not that I mean an exact analogy of

structure'. Ezra Pound, Selected Letters, 1907-1941, ed. D.D. Paige (New York: New

Directions, 1971), p. 294.

41. Thomas Kinsella, Out of Ireland: A Metaphysical Love Sequence, Peppercanister 11

(Dublin: Peppercanister, 1987), p. 12.

42. Thomas Kinsella, One, Peppercanister 5 (Dublin: Peppercanister, 1974), no pagination. 43. In Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir, Pound defines vorticism as follows: 'The image is not

an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce, call a

VORTEX, from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly

rushing.... The organization of forms is a much more energetic and creative action

than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack' (New York: New Directions,

1970), p. 92.

44. Kinsella, The Good Fight, p. 19.

47




the most interesting side of the Pound legacy: namely, the poet's canto structure.... Perhaps Pound's chief gift

to the contemporary

poet, we are now beginning to see, is his recovery for poetry of [in

Guy Davenport's words] "the comic, the satiric, the grotesque, the

narrative", his move beyond the isolated lyric poem (poema) valorized by [the] New Critics ... towards a larger, more capacious

poetic form (poesis) that could once again accommodate various

levels of discourse.45

Kinsella's poetic trajectory from the mid nineteen fifties to the early seventies constitutes a shift from poema to poesis. The beautiful

mannerisms of his early lyric poems find themselves self-reflexively condemned in 'Baggot Street Deserta' for their ineffectual 'isolation':

Versing, like an exile, makes

A virtuoso of the heart,

Interpreting the old mistakes And discords in a work of Art For the One, a

private masterpiece Of doctored recollections.46

Kinsella's dismissive attitude towards 'a work of Art / For the One' recalls

Charles Olson's derisory response to the lyric utterance as 'what you might call the private-soul-at-any public-wall'.47 But neither of Kinsella's early collections, Another September (1958) and Downstream, dispenses with the

lyric or subject-centred narrative poem in favour of anything approaching Black Mountain 'projective verse'. Perhaps too much can be made of the

similarities between many of the poems in these two volumes and the

contemporaneous work of the British Movement poets. That said, Kinsella's early poetry is formally closer to that of, say, Robert Conquest and Donald Davie, than that of the New American Poetry of the nineteen

fifties and sixties, as defined by Donald Allen. However, like Davie, and in contrast to other poets represented in the 1962 New Lines - II anthology,

Kinsella in the mid nineteen fifties was already turning an intrigued albeit ambivalent eye on Olson's precursor, 'GrandPa' Pound.48 Inci

dentally, Davie at this date was also in Dublin, where he taught at Trinity

College from 1950-57, at work on the poems collected in A Winter Talent and Other Poems (1957)

? a number of which deal with Irish subjects ?

and Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry (1955). At one point in the course of his critical book, Davie discusses Pound's

45. Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License: Essays on the Modern and Postmodern Lyric (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990), pp. 133-34.

46. Thomas Kinsella, Another September (Dublin: Dolmen, 1958), p. 30. 47. Olson, Collected Prose, p. 239. 48. On Olson's own

ambiguous response to Pound, see his memoir, 'GrandPa, GoodBye', and his remarkable act of ventriloquism, 'This is Yeats Speaking'. Collected Prose,

pp. 145-51,141-44.

48




'dislocated syntax' in terms that bear comparison with Kinsella's. The

syntax of the Cantos, writes Davie, 'is musical, not linguistic'; its 'rhythm' is 'not only the rhythm that rides through tempo and metre in the verse

paragraph, but also the rhythmical recurrence of ideas hinted at in one

canto, picked up in another much later, suspended for many more, and

so on'.49 On the cusp of his lengthy 'infatuation' with Pound,50 Davie is

as yet sceptical about the Cantos' rhythms: vers libre, he goes on to claim, breaks the 'contract' between poet and reader, as 'rhythm steps out alone

and we must follow it in blind faith, with no metrical landmarks to guide us'.51 Two years after the appearance of Articulate Energy, Kinsella

reviewed Section: Rock-Drill 85-95 de los cantares, contesting the view that

the Cantos is 'a series of lovely short poems embedded in a waste of syn tactical error'. Yet Kinsella follows Davie in wondering what covenant, if any, exists between Pound's 'eccentric' epic endeavour and 'the

common reader', and concludes by entertaining the possibility that 'The

common audience for poetry if there is one may ... find itself excluded

in the end'.52

In 1957, Kinsella was writing poems that preserved Davie's sense of a

contractual obligation between himself and his audience, evidence of

which, it is tempting to surmise, might be found in the fact that two of

his early collections were choices of the British Poetry Book Society. Davie

sees the title poem of Another September as 'a better-than-average

specimen of the well-made poem of the 1950s, as produced in Britain

and America rather more than in Ireland'; and judges his early poems to

be 'elegantly constructed echo-chambers, in which the most audible

voices [are] Auden and Yeats'.53 With Nightwalker and Other Poems and

New Poems, Kinsella, to my mind, makes an analogous gesture to Ted

Hughes a decade earlier, 'who in the 1950s', writes Davie in Articulate

Energy, 'plainly rejected the terms of the contract accepted by the

Movement poets of that era'.54 That Hughes's The Hawk in the Rain was

a Poetry Book Society Choice does not invalidate Davie's remark; nor

does his surprising comparison of the late Poet Laureate to Mick Jagger. Kinsella has expressed interest in Hughes's poetry,55 and there are

important resemblances between the Jungian thematics of Kinsella's

49. Donald Davie, Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955), p. 207.

50. The expression, which 'comprehends exasperation along with exaltation', is Davie's

own; see his revealing foreword to Studies in Ezra Pound, pp. 7-8.

51. Davie, Articulate Energy, p. 317.

52. Thomas Kinsella, The Hundred Cantos of Ezra Pound', Review of Section: Rock

Drill, by Ezra Pound, Irish Press, 26 October 1957, p. 4.

53. Donald Davie, Under Briggflats: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960-1988

(Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), pp. 68, 69.

54. Davie, Articulate Energy, p. 186.

55. Letter to the author, 21st November 1999.

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poetry and Hughes's major 'alchemical dramas' of the nineteen seventies,

Crow, Gaudete and Cave Birds. Yet Hughes's poetic is profoundly non

Poundian; literary modernism influences Hughes's work largely through his characteristically idiosyncratic interpretation of T.S. Eliot as a

shamanic poet, in the line of such Romantic precursors as Keats and

Coleridge.56 Kinsella's use of Jung, by way of contrast, intersects with

his interest in Pound's 'canto structure'.

The Jungian dimension to Notes has received a good deal of com

mentary, and, certainly, some knowledge of the parallels between the

poem's motifs and certain key concepts from analytical psychology is

useful to the reader.57 That said, the form of Notes owes less to Jung than to the modernist long poem combined with the anecdotalism of Robert

Lowell's own provisionally titled or sketch book: Life Studies. Kinsella's

approach ? as he said to Daniel O'Hara ? recalls Lowell's attempt in

Life Studies to work with 'the few things we actually share: the fact that we are human beings, have mothers, fathers, uncles ? families in

general.' Lowell 'moves outward from that point, taking a single con

sciousness and moving with it step by step out among the grades of

shared being. He makes an object in that way'.58 The 'single conscious

ness' of Notes moves in a not unrelated fashion to that of Life Studies,

though it wanders into mythic regions alien to Lowell. T feed upon it

still', comments the speaker of Kinsella's 'Hen Woman', in the course of

recollecting a mundane sight from his youth ? an old woman clutching

a hen, her fumbling hands failing to prevent the hen's egg from falling to the ground where 'It smashed against the grating/ and slipped down

quickly out of sight' (NP, p. 16). The hen woman is representative of the

way in which throughout the section of Notes entitled 'an egg of being' Kinsella metamorphoses literal women (in particular, his grandmothers) into a threatening anima figure, 'her face dark with anger' (NP, p. 14).

The egg's fall is a central metaphor in the sequence: the shattering of the

egg, and its descent through the grating, an image of the quest for

individuation undertaken in the course of the poem as a whole. The act

of feeding upon memories is central to this journey, as reminiscences of

56. See Ted Hughes, A Dancer to God: Tributes to T.S. Eliot (London: Faber and Faber,

1992), pp. 19-47. Reviewing Hughes's Wodwo, Davie claimed that Hughes's poetry (as of 1967) was untouched by modernism (Donald Davie, 'As Deep

as England', Review of Wodwo, by Ted Hughes, The Guardian, 25 May 1967, p. 14). For a sustained

attempt to read Hughes through the prism of New Critical modernism, see Leonard

M. Seigaj, The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Form and Imagination (Iowa: University of Iowa

Press, 1986). 57. On this topic, see Rosenberg, pp. 36-47 and Thomas H. Jackson, The Whole Matter:

The Poetic Evolution of Thomas Kinsella (Dublin: Lilliput, 1995). It is worth noting that, according to Rosenberg, Kinsella began Notes before reading Jung.

58. Thomas Kinsella, Interview with Daniel O'Hara, Contemporary Poetry, Vol. 4, No. 1

(1981), p. 7.

50




family members and acquaintances leach into putatively archetypal realms.

Jung's discussion of the process of individuation draws its inspiration from the procedures of medieval and renaissance alchemy, and, struc

turally speaking, constitutes a variety of quest-romance: the alchemist's

descensus ad inferos and culminating hierosgamos or 'chymical wedding' afford a formal analogy for the psychic journey for a wholeness of being attainable through the integration of consciousness and unconscious

ness.59 In the prologue to Notes, 'hesitate, cease to exist, glitter again', the

Faustian magus's alchemical alembic is a 'cauldron' over the lip of which

'a vapour of forms/ curdled, glittered and vanished'. Such elusiveness

characterizes the poems to follow, of which the cauldron is clearly a

metaphor. As the magus declares: 'How it was done ? that that pot should now/ be boiling before you ... I remember only snatches' (NP,

p. 11). Those 'snatches' can be read as Kinsella's variation on the Homeric

nekuia with which Pound chose to open the Cantos, the living making contact with the dead in an urge for understanding. Like the alchemical

opus, Pound's epic is a journey conceived with a paradisal telos, and

such a goal is preceded by a descent to the land of the dead. Anthony Woodward, drawing on the ideas of Mircea Eliade, sees in Pound's

'Odyssean descent to the realm of the dead' 'a "descensus ad inferos"

undertaken by a living man to learn what he wants to know'.60 Yet the

Cantos' quest for knowledge lacks the firm narrative structure of the

classical epic, though it is replete with snippets of stories. While the

peregrinations in the Cantos are modelled in part upon the journeys made by Odysseus (and Dante), Pound's account of his voyage takes

inspiration from the periplous ? a provisional record of a voyage

? of

the fifth-century Carthaginian, Hanno: 'periplum, not as land looks on a

map/ but as sea bord seen by men sailing' (LIX) (Cantos, p. 339). The

improvised quality to the Cantos finds an echo in the title Notes from the

Land of the Dead, which constitutes Kinsella's periplous of ? to quote the

title of a later collection ? blood and family. However, the title of Kinsella's sequence is reminiscent of Stevens,

specifically his long poem, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, Kinsella's

admiration for which is attested to by his favourable review of Stevens's

Collected Poems for the Irish Press in 1956.61 The tentativeness of Notes

from, like that of Notes Toward, once again brings into focus the interim

nature of Kinsella's sequences, many of which exist in several forms,

59. See C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R.F.C Hull (London: Routledge, second

edition, 1968), pp. 36-7.

60. Anthony Woodward, Ezra Pound and the Pisan Cantos (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 54.

61. Thomas Kinsella, 'Major American Poet', Review of The Collected Poems of Wallace

Stevens, Irish Press, 18 February 1956, p. 4.

51




giving the impression that they can only approach a definitive version

asymptotically. (Indeed, it would be valuable to have the three versions

of Notes in a hypertextual form.) Of course, Pound titled his early collections of cantos A Draft of..., and the Cantos as a whole ends with a

sheaf of Drafts & Fragments; but the desire for totalization is evident even

in those despairing final pieces, in which the cry T cannot make it cohere'

is nevertheless succeeded by the claim that 'it coheres all right/ even if

my notes do not cohere' (CXVI).62 Kinsella's abjuration of Pound's frantic will to cohere, but in a poetic

mode recognizably indebted to the Cantos more than Stevens, reintroduces the importance of Williams's late verse-signature to his

mature style. Kinsella claimed that, in Williams, he found 'a sort of

leverage out of a rather clamped tradition ? with few exits for poetry ? into a state of thinking, an attitude where anything is possible'.63 What

is intriguing about this reflection is that Kinsella has remained greatly

preoccupied with the 'clamped tradition' of Irish history, his blood and

family, paradoxically exploring it through poetic forms generated, in

Williams's case, to cope with the contemporaneous. Recent critics have

accounted for this seeming conundrum by contextualizing the

transformation in Kinsella's poetry within cultural and social changes brought about by Sean Lemass's economic reforms, the modernizing aims of which were published in the 1958 White Paper, Programme for Economic Expansion. John Goodby, for instance, writes that, 'The causes

for change [in Kinsella's poetic], then, lie in modernisation's intensi

fication of the contradictions within Irish culture; asserting an Irish

identity involves, ironically, the importing of technique and [US] models in a manner analogous to the import of multinational capital attacked in

"Nightwalkery".64 At bottom, Goodby finds a (fruitful) mismatch between

Kinsella's identitarian politics and his poetry's late modernist forms, its

allegorical structures at odds with the symbolism that Goodby sees as

characterizing nationalist discourse.

For all the illumination this casts on his poetry, such a materialist

reading of Kinsella courts the danger of appearing overly-reductive. It

fails to discriminate between the American modernists whose poetic

techniques Kinsella 'imported' into his work. One attraction of Williams to Kinsella, I would suggest, lies in his closeness on one level to James

62. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 13th impression, 1995), pp. 816, 817.

63. Kinsella, Interview with Daniel O'Hara, p. 6.

64. John Goodby, Irish Poetry since 1950: From Stillness into History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 121. See also Alex Davis, A Broken Line: Denis Devlin and Irish Poetic Modernism (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2000),

pp. 127-29, and Stephen Matthews, Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiation; the

Evolving Debate 1969 to the Present (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 77-82.

52




Joyce, who functions as an enabling precursor in Kinsella's criticism early and late. David Bennett has argued that Williams's localist modernism

resembles that of the Irish novelist: like Joyce, Williams 'saw himself as

beginning again with a "borrowed" language in a locale whose identity had already been defined by an alien culture'.65 In his paper 'The Irish

Writer', Kinsella speaks of Joyce as 'able to reject (that is accept) the

whole tradition as he found it ? as it lay in stunned silence, still

recovering from the death of its old language'. Joyce's relationship with

the past, Kinsella continues, is an 'act of continuity with a difference: he

simultaneously revives the Irish tradition and admits the modern

world'.66 This admission of Irish modernity includes an awareness of

'what he sees as shaping the new Ireland: the shamrock lumpen

proletariat, the eloquent and conniving and mean-spirited tribe of Dan'.67

A confrontation with 'THE NEW IRELAND' of the nineteen sixties shapes

'Nightwalker', the nation's spirit (or lack of it) epitomized in the figure of 'Our new young minister', Foxhunter Haughey, 'the sonhusband/

Coming in his power'.68 For all its dependence on the formal possibilities

proffered by The Waste Land, 'Nightwalker' is not an Eliotic lament for

the 'disintegration of the intellect' of the mind of Europe.69 Rather, like

Ulysses, it is wilfully Dublincentric. In Kinsella's poetry after 'Night walker', localism conjoins augmented experimentalism in a fashion that

eschews the mandarin aspiration of Pound, and which instead has

affinities with Williams's own qualified use of the Pound legacy. The

thinly-veiled allusion to Pound in 'Downstream' is, after all, distinctly ambivalent: the crepuscular setting

? a harbinger of subsequent Kin

sellian nightscapes ? in which the persona grandiosely chants the

Chinese emperors' names, gradually obscures their luminosity: 'The

gathering shades beginning to deceive,/ Night stole the princely scene.

I closed the page....' (D, p. 51).

65. David Bennett, 'Defining the "American" Difference: Cultural Nationalism and the

Modernist Poetics of William Carlos Williams', Southern Review, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1987),

p. 271.

66. Thomas Kinsella, 'The Irish Writer', in Roger McHugh (ed.), Davis, Mangan, Ferguson ?

Tradition and the Irish Writer (Dublin: Dolmen, 1970), pp. 64, 65.

67. Ibid., pp. 62, 64.

68. Kinsella, Nightwalker, pp. 62, 64.

69. T.S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (London: Faber

and Faber, 1993), p. 227.

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special issue: thomas kinsella || thomas kinsella and the pound legacy: his jacket on the cantos

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