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

FROM THE BEGINNING of critical commentary on The Cantos, an important critical tradition asserted a homology of form between Dante's Commedia and The Cantos.1 On this reading, The Cantos divided like the Commedia into three canticles, an Inferno, a Purgatorio, and a Paradiso, with an "orderly Dantescan rising" giving them shape. This view was relatively easy to uphold as long as The Cantos were in progress, particularly after The Pisan Cantos with their obvious gestures towards the paradisal, and while there were still fewer than 100 cantos. However, after the publication of Thrones (1959), which took The Cantos past the centum of the Commedia, and Pound's death in 1971, which left Drafts & Fragments as the end of the poem, the formal resemblance to the Commedia began to look less compelling.2

In my previous work on Dante and Pound I have argued that the tradition of finding analogies in form between The Cantos and the Commedia was wrongheaded.3 Based on Pound's suggestion that he had not sought an equivalent to the closed form of Dante's work and the fact that, whatever he had intended, Pound had not achieved an equivalent to Dante's closed form, I argued as long ago as 1980 that "Dante and his work are continuously relevant in The Cantos, but not in any continuous way" ("Dante's Hell" 504). Inasmuch as there is a formal parallel between Dante and Pound, it is a disanalogy, not an analogy: Pound's poem contains "by no means an orderly Dantescan rising" (74/443) ,4 either because it fails to achieve Dante's epic form or because it decisively turns away from it in the direction of a more open form representing the complexity of the modern world.

However, I now believe that both of the options I have just outlined-the option of similitude or the option of dissimilitude-get the relation between Dante and Pound wrong because both assume that the relevant issue is the formal resemblance between the Commedia and The Cantos. Critics have focused on the question of form because it seems obvious to everyone that Pound's paradise is not like Dante's in terms of its content, in the structure of the theological beliefs that undergird it. Unlike Eliot, Pound clearly found antipatico the orthodox religious aspect of the Commedia. However, if we have long recognized a disanalogy in terms of content and we now have begun to see a disanalogy in terms of form, how are we to explain the role Dante clearly plays in Pound's poem, particularly in the Late Cantos?

We can get some purchase on this important question once we recognize that Pound had a deep and enduring interest in Dante's works other than the COTO-media.5 Of particular note here is the citation of Il Convivio and some of Dante's lyrics in the Late Cantos, citations that have been expertly explicated but not adequately explained.6 Pound himself seems to have been working with a more expansive sense of the range of Dante's oeuvre than his critics have. Taken as a whole, Dante's work looks quite different from the subset of it-essentially the Commedia with the Vita Nuova as a proemio-most commonly read today. Pound knew the whole corpus: his library contained two editions of the complete works in Italian and Latin as well as a bilingual Commedia and an Italian edition of the poem.7 He worked carefully through Dante's works in toto several times, as the annotations in the volumes indicate. The focus on a formal resemblance between Dante's Paradise and the Late Cantos has obscured the nature of Pound's real indebtedness to Dante. If we consider the full range of Dante's texts cited in the Late Cantos and come to understand what their citation implies about Pound's angle of interest in Dante, we can see why Dante is such a presence in Pound's paradiso. Pound is trying to tell us something about paradise, but we have to look to Dante's works other than the Paradiso to understand what he is saying.

One reason it has been difficult for us to see the continuing relevance of Dante's non-epic work to Pound's epic is the continuing power of the Virgilian pattern for a poet's career, a pattern in which the poet first concentrates on shorter, non-epic forms, then moves in a linear, two-step fashion to the completion of an epic that is the poet's lifework and chief claim to fame. According to Richard Helgerson, "What does a great public poet do? He first writes some small works in which his poetic identity is both questioned and established. Then he writes an epic, forging in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race" (102). Spenser and Milton-Helgerson's focus-shaped their careers in conscious imitation of this Virgilian pattern. Because of Virgil's role in the Commedia, Dante's oeuvre has also typically been seen in such a Virgilian light, with the Commedia serving as his mature epic parallel to the Aeneid. But whereas Virgil's pre-epic verse (the Eclogues and the Georgics) was, of course, pastoral in nature, and whereas both Spenser's Shepheard's Calendar and Milton's Lycidas explicitly present themselves as pastoral poems modelled on Virgil's Eclogues, Dante's poetic works prior to his epic were primarily love lyrics. It's the two stages of Dante's poetic career, not those of Virgil's, that were decisive for Pound: his early verse was obviously heavily influenced by Dante's lyric forms, as well as those of Dante's coeval Guido Cavalcanti and the Provençal forerunners of both. After the turn from lyric to epic, from the private voice of the early verse to the more public voice of The Cantos, Pound collected his shorter verse in Personae, the publication of which in 1926 marks the turn from the lyric to the epic on Dante's model.