The Currency of Drama in the 1910s

“The dramatists are dead: the poets have gone to the funeral”: So journalist and novelist Storm Jameson, The Egoist’s regular columnist on modern drama, begins her assessment of the arts in England in November 1915.Footnote ¹⁵ Maintaining that “Hamlet is as classic as the Iliad or the Agamemnon,” she argues that all arts, but especially drama, have gone downhill, though she singles out for slight praise the “Imagists” and in particular Pound and Aldington.Footnote ¹⁶ It was H.D.’s translation of “Choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis” that had nonetheless appeared in the very same issue of the magazine, apparently already deemed unworthy of even attending the funeral of drama as the wartime canon is set: Hamlet, Iliad, Agamemnon. Two years later, Edward Storer attributes the death of tragic drama to the loss of “belief,” and praises Greek tragedy – its possibility now lost – for its formalism, for presenting “symbolical and characterless” man.Footnote ¹⁷ Lamenting the decline of verse drama and advocating for “blank acting,” Storer fits right in with the new spirit of the Egoist, as Eliot takes over from H.D. as assistant editor, and he and Pound begin the formalist revolution referred to in “Visiting Card”; Storer’s connection between social conditions and metrics was echoed by both Pound and Eliot.

Despite Jameson’s dismissal, the currency of drama at the time is strongly conveyed in H.D.’s semi-fictionalized account of First World War–era London Bid Me to Live. The novel’s first two pages offer a critique of her generation’s modes of relating art to the world and to the past that explicitly flows through Greek tragedy.

H.D. evokes the spirit of the age as one that mixed high and low, that disrespected the “venerable” past, the Uffizi and the Pitti museums in Florence, and playfully equated Punch and Judy with Philoctetes and Jocasta. Her ironic tone, however, betrays the same suspicion that Pound would express about Greek plays and their value, but also about the very -ism that brought her, as a poet, to the forefront of London literary life.Footnote ¹⁸ Though ostensibly concerned with the artistic revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century, H.D. intertwines art and war, mapping the time of the former onto that of the latter. War may be referred to only obliquely in the “crucifying times of history,” but the “liberation” of the arts is itself a revolution, their own and of their own times, and therefore, to some extent violent; thus H.D. introduces the word “march” in the next paragraph to describe not military but artistic activity.

H.D. mocks the artistic pretension of destruction and overcoming – the Futurist, and eventually Hulmean, call to destroy museums – precisely on the basis of what is implied in her first few sentences: The “customs” of the times that seemed particular or unique, “their own,” were in fact implicated in and complicit with history’s but not in the way that these artists had envisioned.Footnote ¹⁹ That is, Pound’s sudden modernization, his launching of a movement and discovery of a publishing outlet may have helped him finally be part of “the times,” but “the times” too were slowly imposing their own “customs” of war and obliteration. The critique, moreover, is twofold. On the one hand, there was an unconscious, at least rhetorical, alignment between artistic revolution and the looming world war, and on the other, a complete separation between the two, the real or feigned indifference of the “intellectuals” towards the specific reality of the war: “the late war-intellectuals gabbed of Oedipus across tea-cups or Soho café tables; it was not Vimy or Loos they talked of” (Bid 8). Given, then, that in this context it is Greek tragedy that is first invoked as a new plaything, even before the -isms, and that the plays H.D. names are Philoctetes, the play of prolonged war and betrayal, and Oedipus Rex, the play of the excess of reason, might H.D. be implying that if the lessons of these plays had been heeded, rather than just touted, one might have foreseen the destruction that ensued?

H.D. seems at first to use Greek tragedy incidentally in order to address a larger issue, but then shows why Greek tragedy is an exemplary site for such reflections. Bid dramatizes H.D.’s/Julia’s turn away from the spirit of the times and the facetious invocation of Philoctetes and Oedipus either as a matter of fashion or of elitism, to a more serious engagement with tragedy (as the “hatching” passage discussed in the Introduction suggests), which we will explore in Chapter 3. Crucially, the catalyzing experience takes place at a movie theater: “as in the stone-ledged theatre benches of fifth-century Greece; so here, a thousand doomed, the dead were watching destruction, Oedipus or Orestes in a slim car, dashing to destruction” (123). Transposing Greek tragedy onto the movie screen, the communal experience of the Athenian theatergoing public onto that of the wartime London movie-watching public, Julia is finally able to articulate an identification that goes beyond the vapid references to Oedipus and that reveals the plays’ direct bearing on the contemporary situation: Oedipus’s destructive quest for absolute truth, Orestes’ for absolute justice. Not the film itself – or the tragic text itself – but the experience of watching it with others reveals to Julia the fundamentally public and in some sense ritual character of tragedy,Footnote ²⁰ as well as its potential as a medium through and in which to grapple with the questions she has been asking throughout the novel: How does one connect the world of art and poetry to the “actual”? Is beauty or redemption possible in the aftermath of the war? Is the past still available for poetry, or is it immaterial in the midst of destruction?

H.D.’s formulation of the cultural aesthetics of the second half of the 1910s in Bid allows us to detect these threads in the work of her contemporaries, who may seem less interested in these questions than she clearly was. We can thus trace the sometimes muted significance of Greek drama in the development of the main currents of modernist poetics; both Eliot and Pound, for example, assess the possibilities of drama in the 1910s, mostly measuring it against the Noh and Greek tragedy, in ways similar to those H.D. highlights. H.D.’s “Choruses,” questioning not only war but art’s complicity in it, were thus far from an outlier; her translations were forerunners in the attempt to grapple with new customs for the times through drama, and specifically through tragedy.

The Promise of Sarah Bernhardt

In late spring 1914, attempting a move from lyric to drama, Pound asks F. S. Flint – whose article on French -isms had likely inspired Pound to start his own two years earlier – for recommendations on French plays after having spent the winter at Stone Cottage reading “mss. plays for the Abbey” with Yeats (L/P 316). About a year later, in early September 1915, upon receipt of the final installment of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and of the play Exiles, Pound writes a long letter to James Joyce, in which he wavers on his opinion on the theater. One senses he doesn’t want to offend Joyce and genuinely likes Exiles, but his elitism prevents him from seeing any future in the endeavor: “My whole habit of thinking of the stage is: that it is a gross, coarse form of art. That a play speaks to a thousand fools huddled together” (L/JJ 46). Even Joyce’s play, though it is better than most, lacks the intensity of Portrait in Pound’s assessment. Concluding that “I hate (oh well, not hate) the theatre,” he nonetheless concedes that “I may be wrong. The thing might carry” (46, 47).

Exiles prompts Pound to write “Mr. James Joyce and the Modern Stage,” an essay published five months later, in February 1916, in The Drama – the journal in which Pound had been publishing excerpts from Fenollosa’s Noh book and where he hoped Exiles itself would appear. The essay contemplates the question of whether drama is a worthwhile medium for authors at that time, the very same question that Eliot would take on with renewed vigor in the 1920s and 30s. Pound is more systematic here than in his letter to Joyce, but equally ambivalent. On the one hand, he makes his case against the audience more starkly. Exiles, he writes, “is a ‘dangerous’ play precisely because the author … is dealing with actual thought, actual questioning, not with clichés of thought and emotion. It is untheatrical … because the closeness and cogency of the process is … too great for an audience to be able to follow … under present conditions” (L/JJ 52). On the other hand, the cautious addition of “under present conditions” may imply that – unlike Eliot, who in his early theater criticism feared the actors’ execution of a play – it is not the form of theater itself that is the problem. Indeed, Pound spends the rest of his essay breaking down the “complex art” of drama into its component parts and considers the “possibilities of greatness” latent in acting, speech, cinema, and so on – a method borrowed perhaps from Fenollosa’s attempt at a systematic treatment of the Noh (52).

What arises from this account is surprising given Pound’s professed disdain for the theater, and suggests most clearly why he would (re)turn to this medium (and to Greek tragedy) after the Second World War and before turning back to the writing of the Cantos. Pound claims he saw “great acting” – that is, “acting itself raised to the dignity of an art” – “once”: in the performance of an aged Sarah Bernhardt in La Sorcière,Footnote ²¹ “not much of a play.” The climax – if not of the play, at least of Pound’s experience of it – comes when

Bernhardt, that is, performs the exact same gesture, and with similar implications of rebirth, that Pound would have his Herakles undertake at the climax of his Women of Trachis. He immediately and tellingly connects this performance to the Noh:

The image, precisely beyond formulated language, and in some ways beyond action. What Pound admires is not the Harrisonian dromenon, nor is there here a strong emphasis on gesture qua ritual (as there would be in Eliot’s own early thoughts on theater), though he does call Bernhardt’s “gestures” “superb” (53). Bernhardt is remarkable because she breaks the boundaries of her limited (to Pound’s eyes) art; against the constant “action” of theatrical plot she becomes “something which can stay still without becoming a bore,” such powerful “stasis” being for Pound the defining feature of art.Footnote ²²

Pound returns to Bernhardt’s clearly haunting performance in his essay’s next section, on “Speech”:

Here Pound articulates the later Eliotic position on the power of verse playsFootnote ²³ in a more precise and visceral way than Eliot would ever describe it. It is also in alignment with his thoughts on meter in relation to Greek tragedy, as they would be articulated in letters and essays of the late 1910s. At the same time, that sense of the audience now receiving messages as it were from the air, just as the poet does in Spirit of Romance, implies the hidden promise of the theater in setting off/up that telegraphic chain of light or sound – sound which again seems to be beyond formulated language, likened to that of a “very small bell.”Footnote ²⁴ Even more crucially though, the conjunction of these two elements on the stage, the sculptural phanopoeia and the hypnotic melopoeia, seems to accord the theater supreme power: to make the utterly evanescent – a performance – permanent for everyone who witnesses it. Without writing, without speech even, the theater can leave a forméd trace in the mind, dove stà memora (to quote Pound’s favorite lines from Cavalcanti’s “Donna me prega”). By returning to Bernhardt throughout the essay, Pound is performing that persistence. More than thirty years later, Pound’s manuscript notes for Sophocles’ Elektra would contain an articulation that recalls the Exiles essay:

The stage, Pound suggests, allows for the combination of sound and vision, melopoeia and phanopoeia. It is for this reason as well, and perhaps also prompted by H.D.’s translations of Iphigeneia, that Pound proposes the Noh play, comparable to a Greek tragedy, as a potential model for writing a long (imagist) poem – the triangulation that would come to fruition in Women of Trachis.Footnote ²⁶

Noh, Tragedy, and the Long Poem

As we have seen, one way in which Pound pursues poems of greater length is through lyric sequences, shading into versions of Browning-esque dramatic monologue: from “Ladies” to “Homage to Quintus Septimius Florentis Christianus” to Propertius and Mauberley. Another model is the epic, but that doesn’t fully crystallize in Pound’s mind until 1918, despite the already completed translation of Divus that would become Canto 1. But in the crucial transitional years of 1915–16, Pound also attempts to conceptualize the long poem through drama. In Gaudier-Brzeska, exactly where he theorizes imagism as translation, he suggests that for an imagist poem to “live” longer than a few lines, it must be similar to Japanese Noh plays.Footnote ²⁷ The Noh shares with imagism a hygienic, reductive emphasis, functioning as “a purification of the Japanese soul” (P&T 361). What interests Pound the most is that “[i]n the best “Noh” the whole play may consist of one image. I mean it is gathered about one image. Its unity consists in one image,” much like “the Greek plays are built up about a single moral conviction” (GB 94; P&T 368). The latent Noh image may be ready to be discovered, but for Pound it too only appears beyond formulated language:Footnote ²⁸ the words “are themselves but half shadows” and become intelligible if “‘you read them all the time as though you were listening to music’” (P&T 336). The word-musical element of the Noh, restoring the importance of melopoeia, brings it closer first to the troubadour poetry that Pound so admired,Footnote ²⁹ but also back to Greek, and from a different angle: not that of structure or ritualistic function, but of prosody. The poetic model the Noh provides, then, addresses both technical, formal concerns (regarding the relationship, e.g, between vision and sound, speech and music, and the coherence of the whole despite the reliance on multiple poetic resources) and a societal/political function.

Indeed, Eliot offers Pound a framework through which to “legitimize” his interest in Greek sound by connecting it to the larger historical patterns they are both interested in at the time. As Storer would suggest in the Egoist, part of what makes tragedy appealing is the connection it reveals between poetry and culture. Similarly Eliot in 1917’s “Reflections on Vers Libre” insists that “the decay of intricate formal patterns has nothing to do with the advent of vers libre” (CP 1, 516). Their flourishing, he asserts, does not depend on poetry but on the polity:

He thus ties metrics to society, giving poetic form a political, or at least social, extension, much as Pound had done with Tagore in 1913 and again with the Noh in 1916–17.Footnote ³⁰

For Eliot too the Noh functions as a paradigm for what is desirable in modern theater, and perhaps poetry too, but in contradistinction to tragedy. His early writing on drama hits some of the same notes as Pound’s – anti-realism, preference for form over plot and suggestiveness over statement, elitist disdain of audiences – though he is already more invested in its possible success.Footnote ³¹ In “The Noh and the Image,” his 1917 review of Pound’s Noh translations, Eliot presents Noh as an imagist corrective to Greek tragedy. The Noh chorus may speak “in a lament almost Greek,” but “the ‘image’ character of Noh makes the play brief,” thereby “prevent[ing] rhetoric,” that perennial imagist enemy and precisely what Pound and Eliot both disliked in Greek choral songs (CP 1, 567). The only Greek play comparable to the Noh in terms of “the unity of the image” is Prometheus, singled out as the least realistic of the extant Greek plays since, like the Noh, it presents “that impersonal, and … inhuman force” (566).

Eliot also tests out in this Noh review the soon-to-be-formulated idea of the “objective correlative,” which he would define in 1919 as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of the particular emotion” that a work of art seeks to convey (CP 2, 125). Eliot uses it to draw a distinction between Greek drama (still exclusively represented by Aeschylus) and Shakespeare on the one hand, and the Noh on the other:

While the Noh stage is sparse, what is present collects the energies of all that is left unsaid or unseen. Unlike in Hamlet, whose problem, per the 1919 essay, is the inadequacy of “the external to the emotion,” in the Noh the emotion is suggestively yet always concretely on display (CP 2, 125). It is precisely this desire to “enact” the ghost that leads Eliot to use the silent figures of the Eumenides in The Family Reunion: as a kind of objective correlative that may illuminate the mind of Harry or complement his own semi-articulate explanations. The theater, again, seems the pathway to the timeless-in-time for art, a way to show, as Pound would later put it in his Elektra, that the “DEAD / don’t / DIE” (lines 1754–56).

Eliot finally measures the degree of Pound’s own (Japanese-filtered) poetic innovations; his assessment hinges on the determination of what is an appropriate dramatic voice. He principally objects to what seems to him to be Yeats’s influence in the dialogueFootnote ³² – an early attempt on Pound’s part to “get a ‘language’” perhaps – while he singles out for praise, and ends his review on, the mostly (bilingually) onomatopoetic ghost lovers’ cricket song in Nishikigi. (Such a split assessment will haunt all of Pound’s translations of Greek tragedy.) The song is, claims Eliot, “a remarkable triumph of translator’s skill: it is certainly English, and it is certainly new in English” (567):

“English” is thus being redefined here as the kind of verse that readily incorporates these other sounds or languages: the kind of English we find in Eliot’s The Waste Land, sometimes in the Cantos, and definitely in Pound’s translations from Greek. The triumph of the translator’s skill lies in the knowing deployment of non-translation, and in using the other language to create an interlinguistic whole, much as Pound would try to do years later in his Elektra. Sound is encoded with meaning here: “kiri” and “hatari” combine to give “cricket,” which morphs into “rags” and “grass”; “grass” is then transformed into “churr” and “whirr.” “Churr” is itself onomatopoetic, and echoes back to “cho,” a word that has also started a separate sonic chain: from the English “sews” to the Japanese “sho” and “isho.” What the cricket is celebrated as doing is precisely what the poet is doing: sewing the old rags (of English) with the new (Japanese) grass in the field. The next play in the sequence, “Kinuta,” also ends with a cricket song – a “sad sound” this time, still incorporated into Pound’s English – that resolves into “a whispering lamentation, hera, hera, a sound in the cloth of beauty” (P&T 423). We will hear this cry again in Women of Trachis.

Such an onomatopoetic cry lies at the heart of the shared Eliot–Pound mythology of the Agamemnon.Footnote ³³ There the chorus compares Kassandra’s incomprehensible and inharmonious/tuneless (ἄνομον) cries to the song of the nightingale, groaning for Itys: ᾿Ίτυν ᾿Ίτυν στένουσ ̓ (lines 1142, 1144). “Itys” is both a name and a sound, and we hear it echoing in The Waste Land’s “twit, twit, twit” (P 63), praised in Pound’s essay on Aeschylus, and lamented in the Pisan Cantos. Similarly, the choral song earlier in the play that famously puns on Helen’s name is, first, another instance of sound encoding meaning and second, also about that very process, since the chorus is commenting on the appropriateness of Helen’s name (which is of course itself a lifelong Poundian preoccupation). The punning words ἑλέναυς, ἕλανδρος, ἑλέπτολις (helenaus, helandros, heleptolis, “hell to ships, to men, to cities”) will also echo throughout the CantosFootnote ³⁴ and, as we have seen, serve as shorthand for Eliot’s response to the draft of Canto 2. Pound and Eliot seem to be aligned on what makes a voice appropriately dramatic: It hovers on the border of intelligibility, and points at something beyond itself, not exhausting itself in the performance. However, even though both poets would use Greek tragedy especially to think about history or, more broadly, about the relation of the present to the past, and both are drawn to its promise of communal – whether religious or political – power, Pound would hold on to the importance of linguistic formalism and formalization (paradigmatically expressed through metrical experimentation or foreign languages) more than Eliot, whose approach in his tragedy adaptations would be primarily structural.

Contracting Greek Tragedy

Despite the promising connection between Greco-Japanese drama and English poetics in GB, Pound’s later critical writings on the theater hit the skeptical note more often than not. Its promise of being a total work of art is seen from the opposite side, and theater is dismissed as a “mixed art” that is faulty because it doesn’t rely solely on writing. For example, in a typescript draft of “How to Read,” we are told that “The literary element need not be very good, in a play … bad writing can be very useful for theatrical purposes.”Footnote ³⁵ Tragedy doesn’t fare better, it too apparently marred by “bad writing.” At almost the same time as he’s thinking about it in conjunction with Noh, he confesses to Iris Barry that he is “suspicious of Greek drama”:

Pound’s critique here is similar to Eliot’s in his unpublished French review of translations from Greek (discussed in the Introduction), which also focused on clichés and verboseness. Pound’s own conclusion on the Virgilian clichéFootnote ³⁷ – transposed here from the “Greeks” in general to drama specifically – suggests, however, that Pound is merely going through the motions of opining on this “important literature,” and thus himself using some of the rhetoric associated with it. The play whose name Pound has forgotten is, of course, Persians – not a very difficult name to remember if one has read the play at all.

Pound’s choice of plays also reflects prevailing intellectual currents – both poetic and academic. For one, Pound like Eliot falls prey to the nineteenth-century prejudice in favor of Aeschylus.Footnote ³⁸ Prometheus and Persians are part of the so-called “Byzantine triad” for Aeschylus,Footnote ³⁹ and so the ones with most accrued scholarly or pedagogical prestige or, for Pound, philological detritus. That Pound does not seem embarrassed by his acutely Shelleyan selections also suggests that that is precisely the nature of his attack. Shelley’s counter-Aeschylean, tradition-flouting sequel to Prometheus Bound in Prometheus Unbound (1819) and his revolutionary modernization of Persians in Hellas (1822) act as a negative filter that prevents Pound from actually engaging with the plays.Footnote ⁴⁰ He may also be hiding a more personal embarrassment over his own “stale creampuffs”: 1908’s A Lume Spento contains a poem titled “Prometheus,” which betrays Pound’s earlier attraction to Prometheus as a quintessentially Romantic figure.Footnote ⁴¹ The Titan may have been newly present in Pound’s mind because his hellenist rival Richard Aldington had translated the very end of the play in the early 1910sFootnote ⁴² and had written a “Prometheus” poem too. Finally, it is Prometheus that Nietzsche singles out in The Birth of Tragedy, turning him into an “ideal” Dionysian figure,Footnote ⁴³ and there is no doubt that this Dionysianism, filtered down through Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray’s work, lies behind Aldington’s engagement and thus also Pound’s, again prejudicing his (and Eliot’s) response.

Yet Pound’s attitude is more subtle; what is being rejected is less the plays themselves than the various prevailing approaches to them (even as those color Pound’s rhetoric). This explains his eventual shift to the Oresteia, and the Agamemnon in particular, whose only prominent expounder is Browning; though Pound rips his translation to shreds, he does so as Browning’s avowed admirer. Pound may here facetiously dismiss the sense of duty – one must read Greek plays because they are excellent – that Eliot expresses more earnestly, but he does express some admiration for the ones he singles out. These two plays contemplate questions of Greek identity (Persians) and religious belief (Prometheus), in Pound’s favorite triangulated, comparative way. In the former, Aeschylus surveys his own culture through the (imagined) eyes of the Persians; in the latter, the drama is fully displaced onto the divine realm. These are Greek mythical figures, of course, but they are also allegorized forces of nature (as Shelley suggests), of the kind that would come to populate the Cantos; after all, Prometheus comes onstage calling to natural powers against Zeus, to the plenitude of nature against hierarchy.

Though conceptually tragedy is aligned with the Noh as offering a way into a long poem, unsurprisingly what draws Pound back down to tragedy’s specifics is the melopoeia he had abandoned in Lustra. Pound ends his next letter to Barry with the following postscriptum:

Once again expressing his suspicion of a much-discussed play, Pound responds to Oedipus through a familial lineage of his own – one which is not tragically doomed but according to which each generation is better than the preceding one. The familial relation between French and Latin is of course different from that between Latin and Greek, making evolution or improvement in the former case easier to conceptualize. English, pointedly absent here, would thus stand on the other side of Romance languages in the way that Greek does. Moreover, as soon as he proposes this genealogical hierarchy of languages, in which Greek would rank last, Pound himself points out its less than steady ground: Greek is the worst, “save certain melodic effects,” which, presumably, remain to be improved upon, perhaps in a not so bad “trans. of Sophocles.” Is that the challenge he sets for English, his own tongue that is left unmentioned and unranked? By 1918 Pound would attribute “the desire for vers libre” in English poetry to “the sense of quantity reasserting itself after years of starvation” (LE 12).

While Pound remains skeptical of Greek tragedy yet intrigued by the possibilities of its translation, Eliot is more committed to its value without translation. The difference in the two poets’ priorities with respect to Greek is nowhere clearer than in their reviews of H.D.’s Iphigeneia choruses. Both praise her work against existing translations of tragedy – especially Gilbert Murray’s – while Eliot specifically excludes her from his panning of the rest of the PTS. But the goal of their reviews is different. Pound is trying to figure out how best to translate tragedy – and so, for instance, begins his essay by ironizing critics of such a project – while Eliot is hinting at an argument for not doing so at all. For Pound, regardless of the merits of H.D.’s English text, which he does not discuss in detail, H.D. is in the wrong from the outset because of her choice of materials; she has picked the wrong tragedian and given up on the sense of the whole by translating only choruses (P&P 3, 224). Pound himself would soon attempt to rectify these faults through his work on the Agamemnon. Eliot makes similar points in his own review, written two years before. He sees a disjunction between H.D.’s modern English poetic commitments and Greek poetics; for instance, by focusing on Euripides’ images – which, according to Eliot, “were made up of stock phrases rearranged” – she “lose[s] contact with the original in avoiding clichés” (CP 1, 493). This in turn reinforces his argument that there is “no adequate translation” of Greek (italics in original, 493). For Eliot’s primary charge against Murray isn’t the staleness of his poetic style but the implicit ideology of his approach: He has transformed Euripides into “an ideal of socialism and popular education,” presenting the possibility of “Greek without tears” (493). This has thematic and linguistic implications; “Greek without tears” means viewing tragedy as fundamentally optimistic and making it easier to approach and study through translation, which in turn disincentivizes the learning of Greek (493).

The two poets’ broader attitudes towards Greek also come through in the details of their rhetoric and intimate how each is about to make his opening bid for tragedy. For Pound Greek is, if not a threat, a challenge; for Eliot it is an exploitable resource. H.D., Eliot writes, does often succeed in bringing Greek and English into contact, which “gives life to both … makes it possible for the modern language perpetually to draw sustenance from the dead” (494). English and Greek may be figured as dead if this translation is what gives them life, but then Eliot explicitly identifies only Greek as the dead language, presaging his 1925 appeal for the learning of Greek because it is dead (CP 2, 576). Pound instead identifies H.D.’s major contribution as follows: “If,” he writes, “via Homer and Aeschylus one have contracted an interest in the Atreidae, H.D.’s choruses should be a great relief from other windy and verbose translators” (P&P 3, 224). In contrast to Eliot’s wholesome reference to “sustenance,” Pound’s use of “contract” to specify the mode of transmission of such interest is more ominous. Throughout his essays Pound resorts to terminology of infection and inoculation when issuing his prescriptions for how to write or “how to read”;Footnote ⁴⁴ he is in the business of offering cures. Pound may be receptive to H.D.’s translation project so that this turn to the Atreidae is not an altogether unwelcome contraction, but a contraction it remains nonetheless, as though once you begin to approach Agamemnon, you catch a disease that you cannot shake off. At the same time, such a contraction is also a contract – the verb contract is shared by both nouns. The Atreidae impose, as it were, a formal obligation; once you begin with them, you “enter into a formal and legally binding agreement” and “become liable to pay (a debt),” to use two of the verb’s definitions, a debt to a debtor who, per the letters to Barry, is not to be trusted. If half of this short review seems focused on the errant paths to which such a contract may lead – and has led: H.D. to Euripides and Robert Browning to a “signal botch” (P&P 3, 224) – it is only because Pound himself has contracted the disease. Indeed, in this text Pound is only gearing up for tackling the Agamemnon: A month later, his own essay on the play would appear as part of his “Hellenist Series.”

Accursed Hel(l)enism ca. 1919

Pound’s approach in the “Hellenist Series,” appearing in the Egoist from August 1918 to April 1919, is to study the hellenisms of the past through their translations, to assess texts rather than accept pre-formed ideology (though of course his assessment itself is not ideology-free).Footnote ⁴⁵ Against “pedants yapping about the glory that was this and the grandeur that was the other,” he advocates for displaying “the same spirit of ‘readiness to judge’ wherein we read Rimbaud and Corbière” also when we read “the classics” (25). Otherwise, Pound argues, “they become mere Nelson Columns, mere monuments in the landscape – deader, indeed, than stone columns” (25). On this account, “the classics” have staked a claim on our territory – conquered it like Admiral Nelson – and we have submitted all too willingly to a now-dead threat. Much like Winckelmann, who must somewhat arbitrarily declare the end of Greek art so that something like modern art can begin, Pound sifts through the apparent pinnacles of Greek achievement only to declare them, with the potential exception of Homer, unusable if not useless, unless perhaps they are tackled through the medium of Latin. Even Sappho, though praised (“made of perfect sound”), is treated with skepticism: She is “not on that account, of necessity, a model for modern writing” – a lesson learned by experience (24, italics in original). Pound’s final move – an abrupt jump from praising an eighteenth-century English edition of Ovid’s epistles to the citation of the opening of Aeschylus’s Prometheus in a nineteenth-century Italian translation – may make some sense when seen in this light. As Pound had already determined in Lustra with respect to lyric, Greek cannot be meaningfully approached except through its Renaissance rediscovery, whose aftereffects may still be most strongly and productively felt in Italy or France (with Salel’s versions so praised in the Homer installments) but not (yet) in the English-speaking world. The “Hellenist Series” thus declares the end of hellenism even as it appears theoretically committed to its revival; from this point on, H.D., insisting on Greek, can be derided as a “narrow minded she-bard” who is only interested in “Alexandrine Greek bunk” (L 157; September 11, 1920). Such a stance undergirds Eliot’s use of Greek, qua both language and exemplum, in Poems, 1920: as a mocking counterpoint to contemporary inanities, but with no sense of nostalgia. We see the Greek Nelson pillars that imbue the poems’ implicit speakers and certainly their protagonists with a sense of decadence, but the very idealization that is performed for the establishment of this idea of decadence is itself mocked.

The sixth and last installment of Pound’s series, from which all the above pronouncements are taken, was curiously never republished; given its pessimism, perhaps it was thought to be an unfitting conclusion to a hellenist series.Footnote ⁴⁶ When collected in Instigations the following year, the series ends on a much more ambivalent note: literally on a postscript newly appended to the fifth installment focused on Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. Pound himself, it would seem, is not actually ready to leave Greek behind. Before dismissing Greek tout court, Aeschylus included, in part vi, he had attempted to translate him, to test out personally, and for his time, whether he was usable. Besides the long translation of Divus – that is, Canto 1 – provided earlier in the series, Pound does not offer any of his own translations in the Homer or Sappho articles. But he does seem to do so throughout the Aeschylus section, and especially after he makes rhetorical show of returning “thankfully” from the “welter” of existing nineteenth-century English translations to Thomas Stanley’s Greek and Latin (LE 269).Footnote ⁴⁷ His treatment of these passages within the essay and in his separate, unpublished translation of the play’s opening prefigures his later turn to tragedy, thus undercutting the bombast in the series’ conclusion.

Pound sees the Agamemnon as providing a crucial link between literature and history, elevating, in the famed ἑλέναυς choral song, the mythical character of Helen into “a historical principle,” as she would be in Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The play additionally reflects this link in an intricate formal and aural pattern of the kind admired by Eliot in “Reflections on Vers Libre.” Bush rightly notes that Pound was interested in the way that Homer in particular conveys “the swing of words spoken.” This “authentic cadence of speech” is, however, only one of Homer’s sonic qualities that “remain[s] untranslated,” while another quality Pound highlights is both “untranslated and untranslatable”: “the magnificent onomatopoeia” (LE 250). Such appropriateness of language to thing is thematized in the choral song on Helen and echoed in the early Cantos: “Who was it that gave a name / so utterly appropriate – / perhaps a being we cannot see, / using language with accuracy / through his foreknowledge of what was fated?,”Footnote ⁴⁹ the Aeschylean chorus wonders. Of course what the strophe seeks to justify is a poetic sleight of hand: Aeschylus’s own puns on Helen’s name. It is the poet who makes Helen’s name appropriate. Pound’s account of both the teichoskopia scene in Iliad 3 and the Agamemnon forges a connection between specifically linguistic/aural elements and greater historical forces.

Pound’s Aeschylus essay, as well as his translation of Agamemnon’s opening, struggles to reconcile the necessity of conveying in translation “the swing of words spoken” – thus achieving the imagist “direct treatment of the thing” – and Greek sonic qualities or melopoeia – just as his Anthology poems did. Because Pound’s prime interlocutor is Browning’s “distorted” version; because he himself had poetically abandoned the search for Greek melopoeia in Ripostes for the terseness of Lustra; and perhaps even because Eliot had found his dialogue in the Noh plays less successful than his lyrics, his rhetorical emphasis is on the former, on the cadence of speech. So, he reproaches Browning for his “stilted unsayable jargon,” which both misrepresents Greek and disfigures English, failing to convey, for example, the strong emotion presumably present in the declaration of Greek victory at Troy (LE 270). Indeed, it would be Jean Cocteau’s ability to render Antigone’s lines “with all the force any man ever imagined inherent in greek [sic] originals” that made that translation permanently worthy of praise (GK 93). But Pound’s major regret regarding his own translation of Agamemnon’s opening is in fact his inability to approach Greek sound and meter; moreover, a close look at his translations within the essay itself suggests that in practice he is quite attentive to all aspects of the Greek text.

Though Pound keeps the “whole” of Agamemnon in view in his essay, he becomes mired in its particulars, implicitly pitting its musicality against directness of speech. Like the Homer sections of the “Hellenist Series,” the Aeschylus installment contains many quotations. All are passages that would return in Pound’s work, so I will treat them in some detail below, but first I’d like to provide an overview of the essay’s odd trajectory through the play. Pound understandably starts his discussion from the beginning, citing moments from the opening that he would himself translate (e.g., the account of the Greek takeover of Troy), before skipping to its climactic action: Agamemnon’s murder. Rather than end the essay there, he goes back through the play, now tracing its emotional content in significantly longer passages. We read a collation of Kassandra’s “screams” in Latin; the famous strophe from the Helen chorus (in Latin and two unidentified English versions) as well as its supplement later in the play (in Latin);Footnote ⁵⁰ sections from Klytemnestra’s monologue outlining her emotional investment in the murder because of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia (in Latin, with a few lines in English); before finally circling right back to the beginning, and Klytemnestra’s description of the beacons that conveyed news of the Greek victory from Troy all throughout Greece and back to Mycenae (in Morshead’s English translation). The essay is then suddenly abandoned, the later “p.s.” indicating the author’s embarrassment at this fact: “I leave these notes, rough as they are, to indicate a block of matter needing examination” (LE 275). It’s as if the play for Pound is telling two stories simultaneously that cannot be reconciled in a critical account: one about the tragic downfall of a great leader and thus perhaps also of a particular culture, the other about the female voices that haunt any such monologic or simplified account.

The passages selected reveal Pound’s attunement to the play’s various modes: from the surprisingly metaphorical or imagistically dense to the lyrically despairing to the brazenly direct to the combination of all these in the Helen chorus. But Pound’s translation practice within the essay appears to align with a domesticating translation strategy. He finds himself capable of only conveying in his English what a strict imagistic aesthetic would choose to convey, while the bare, almost inarticulate emotional outbursts, such as those of Kassandra or Agamemnon, and other moments of sonic richness are here left aside (as they had not been in, say, the admired version of the Nishikigi cricket song). Though he rejects his own “bungling translation” of Agamemnon’s murder (to which he would return in both the Pisan Cantos and Elektra) – “This is Agamemnon, / My husband, / Dead by this hand, / And a good job. These, gentlemen, are the facts” (LE 271) – he insists on the necessity for “any natural wording” that highlights “Klutaimnestra actual, dealing with an actual situation” (LE 270).Footnote ⁵¹ He similarly argues, and provides his own English options, for something that can be “shouted” as the appropriate translation of Klytemnestra’s declaration of Greek victory at Troy earlier in the play.

Pound’s translation of the Helen chorus seems to exemplify this strategy, since he doesn’t attempt to replicate the Aeschylean puns. He cites the chorus more extensively in Stanley’s Latin (thirteen lines), then offers two similar translations (nine lines each) with no attribution and little comment.

The typescript draft of this essay clearly indicates that these are Pound’s own versions: lines are crossed out, retyped, crossed out again, or written out by hand.Footnote ⁵² In the truncated republication of the series in Instigations he adds to them a cautionary note that both acknowledges H.D.’s pivotal role in the effort of translating Greek tragedy (which he’s now joining) and critiques it: “H.D.’s translations from Euripides should be mentioned either here or in connection with ‘The New Poetry’; she has obtained beautiful strophes…. Elsewhere she retains certain needless locutions, and her versification permits too many dead stops in its current” (353). She appears to have “failed” first in the exact way that Pound would describe his own failure with Agamemnon in the Dial a few years later: “you put it [= needless locutions] in and the thing goes dead” (P&P 4, 284–85). Moreover, we see here that crucial “or” that reappears in “A Visiting Card”: Should H.D.’s choruses be discussed in the context of translations of Greek tragedy or of “‘The New Poetry’”? At this moment Pound himself doesn’t seem sure, and is thus also not sure where his own efforts with Aeschylus and with this “Hellenist Series” would fall. Is he a modernist or a hellenist? A translator or a “new poet”? For now the categories seem to overlap, and Pound is too uncertain of his own offerings as translator to even acknowledge these two versions of Aeschylus as his own.

The first version looks a little like H.D., with her strong preference in the “Choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis” for short, adjectivally rich phrases and hyphenated compound words; so, for example, Pound has “war-wed” for the hapax legomenon δορίγαμβρον (dorigambron). But the consistent trochaic/dactylic openings are a Poundian signature, as is the persistent use of alliteration (note the s of strife traveling throughout the first translation until it’s finally replaced in the last half-line by the d slant rhyme echoing back to wed), and the visual, though not prosodic, echo of a sapphic stanza. The second version differs from the first in aural and visual rhythm rather than diction. The condensation of the first line and the parenthetical “fitly” establish the opening dactylo-trochaic rhythm more clearly: wár-wed, contésted / Hélen, destróyer of shíps; of mén. The breaking up of the stanzas into couplets highlights the slant rhymes and clarifies the trochaic reading, while at the same time isolating the images and locations present in the passage, thus laying bare its well-thought-out structure. The journey’s origin, span, and destination are brought to imagistic focus, respectively marked by curtains–land (Sparta), oars–sea (Aegean), and red leaves–Simois (Troy); this account is sandwiched between commentary on the nature of Helen (destroyer, rank flower), who, after all, occasioned the journey. The final two lines – a freer, again more clearly imagistic, translation than his first version, with the blood implied rather than stated – sound strikingly like some of Pound’s Chinese-inspired imagist poems (e.g., “The Jewel-Steps’ Grievance”). In Greek the shift into different meters for the stanza’s last three lines (Pound’s last two) turns them into “a sort of ‘ephymnium rhythmicum,’”Footnote ⁵³ which is precisely what Pound captures with his marked-off concluding lines.

In his second version Pound uses the difficult-to-translate Ἀμφινεικῆ (Amphineikē)Footnote ⁵⁴ as what he would later call the “key phrase,” or image that structures the whole piece. Stanley does not comment on the word, translating “contentionum.” The passage as excerpted by Pound begins with this “contestation” and ends on the bloody eris ‘strife’, coming full circle. So Pound emphasizes Helen’s being claimed by both sides and ends by again evoking the larger picture of love disputed (in Troy). The rest of the passage too, as made clear by Pound’s lineation in the second version, develops out of such a push-and-pull: between the enclosed room (curtains) and the breeze, the land and the sea, the river and the sea, the idea of a presumably visible track and the unseen traces, the color red and the usually green leaves, rankness and the customarily pleasant flower of love. Helen’s very name is pulled in many directions through Aeschylus’s puns. Yet, though Pound makes a point of echoing at least the hard k of Ἀμφινεικῆ throughout the translation (in “delicate-curtained,” “tracks,” and “rank,” which also reads in itself like a condensation of the Greek word, consisting of its beginning a, middle n, and final k), his interest is at this moment clearly on imagistic superposition and contrast. The lines meditating on the “right name” that introduce it, together with the Helen pun (which Pound translates semantically only through “destroyer”), are ignored, and even the “fitly” becomes parenthetical.

These translations are facilitated by Stanley’s edition: He prints no more than three Greek words per line and, unlike current editions, which cut words across lines in accordance with prevailing metrical readings, Stanley lineates important words together and translates them thus in his Latin, giving the impression of Station-of-the-Metro-esque image clusters. Moreover, though the meter is now considered as trochaic in the first few lines (681–85; only the last two are in Pound’s selection), then shifting into ionics characterized by a rising rhythm (688–95),Footnote ⁵⁵ in Stanley’s edition fewer lines switch to an anapestic opening; this explains and justifies Pound’s continuing use of a mostly falling rhythm in his translation.Footnote ⁵⁶ That is, Pound attempts some translation of melopoeia. He replicates the echo of the strophe’s meter while also adapting it; the separation into couplets and individual lines suggests different voices speaking (as would be the case in a chorus) that are nonetheless tied together sonically through the trochaic slant rhymes (cities–breezes–traces–Simois). Such subtle effects, often anchored by a key word presented in Greek (as by Ἀμφινεικῆ here), are what Pound’s choral songs in Women of Trachis thirty years later would strive for.

This second version, then, is “hellenist” and fully imagist. That is, it is not just imitatively Greek like the first “Sapphic” version, but also echoes the lessons Pound drew from Chinese: the emphasis on parallelism, condensation, and implication or inference rather than statement. In addition to marking Helen as a force of history, this strophe in Pound’s translational X-ray seems to strike all the relevant poetic notes – and even some musical ones. It may call for H.D.’s translation mode, as Pound somewhat begrudgingly implies in his Instigations note, but the tightness of its construction, which his version foregrounds, does not allow for her (or is it Euripides’?) supposed “verbosity.”Footnote ⁵⁷

Pound’s next translation is of a surprising passage: Klytemnestra’s justification of her actions through Iphigeneia. This passage is important for establishing the circularity of the “curse” of the Atreidae that would so interest Eliot, but doesn’t hit any of the motifs that interest Pound, so it is not immediately clear why he included or translated it. For one, it forges a connection back to the only decent contemporary translation of tragedy he knows: H.D.’s “Choruses from Iphigeneia in Aulis”. At the same time, it continues the mostly sympathetic portrayal of Klytemnestra that we’ve had throughout the essay. Earlier she was implicitly admired for her murderous efficiency – a position that makes sense if Agamemnon is identified with the warmongers Pound condemns so strongly in Mauberley and the Hell Cantos – and now her own motivating trauma, as well as her sarcastic temper, is revealed. In fact, Klytemnestra is the only character, other than the chorus in the song just discussed, that Pound speaks through in his English instead of citing another translation.

Klytemnestra’s sung speech is repetitive here, hitting the same theme of revenge three times in seven lines; hence Pound’s attempt to “condense.” Even so, the two lines he omits make their presence felt in what he translates. The repetition he adds – namely, the rhyme on Iphigeneia’s name – is less surprising if considered as a way to perform the meaning of the word he cuts, polyklauton ‘much-lamented,’ which might have otherwise necessitated an unwieldy compound. Similarly, his “ironic equivalent” shows his attunement to Klytemnestra’s tone as seen most clearly in the (untranslated) line 1527: ἄξια δράσας ἄξια πάσχων (“fit suffering for fit deeds”).Footnote ⁵⁸ In both cases, his condensation is also an intensification that aims to conserve as much as possible from his original. (He does of course give up entirely on the musical structure here.)

The essay ends by going back to the play’s beginning – the chain of lights – and thus fulfills the expectation of circularity that is laid out in Klytemnestra’s speech. Pound provides it without further comment in another translator’s “bearable” words – E. D. A. Morshead’s, who was able to carry this story forward, as Pound is not (LE 274).Footnote ⁵⁹ The translating experience recorded in this essay is what the Pisan Cantos will remember, but by the mid-1940s the emotional center and moral valences have swerved away from Klytemnestra as a necessary actor and even from Helen herself as a Yeatsian historical force. While the need for directness and imagistic coherence – clearly what Pound’s translations are striving for in this essay – will remain, the pressure for melopoeia and for “right naming” (the latter elided here despite being explicitly broached by Aeschylus) will grow much stronger.

“Every possible dodge”: Pound’s “Opening for an Agamemnon”

The two Agamemnon passages for which Pound offers English translations by others bracket his Aeschylus essay: Browning’s account of the fall of Troy in the beginning and Morshead’s Klytemnestran beacons at the very end. Returning to unfinished business, Pound translates exactly these sections in the unpublished “Opening for an Agamemnon,” dated by Pound “1919 or thereabouts.” The “Opening” is aggressively colloquial, as if offering a corrective to Browning’s unsayable “botch.” It is also reductive: Pound takes out over two hundred lines sung by the chorus after the watchman (renamed the “Concierge”) speaks and before Klytemnestra appears, in which they set the stage by retelling the story of the Trojan War. What he attempts in the translation is guided by his essay and by the interest he articulates there in three aspects of the Aeschylean text: directness as seen in the spoken quality of the dialogue, which gives the sense of a live drama; lexical polysemy; and musicality.

Due to the brevity of the translation, there is no opportunity for character development or for the demonstration of sympathy; still, Klytemnestra is again allowed to function indirectly as the poet’s anti-war mouthpiece, speaking ironically against those around her. Referring to a potential objection to Greek atrocities at Troy, she asks, “What cher mean? / Don’t they always do it? What’s / A war for anyhow” (119). Surprisingly, given the resonances the play will later acquire in his work, Pound omits in this opening scene the Greek herald’s claim to honor Agamemnon “above all other mortals now alive” because he has destroyed the seed (sperma) of the whole land (chthonos) of Troy.Footnote ⁶⁰ The glorification of Agamemnon would undercut the anti-war skepticism that Pound seems to want to infuse the play with in 1919; similarly, since the emphasis on the extent of destruction doesn’t lend itself easily to irony, Pound does not translate or gesture towards two of his favorite Greek words. The exact same elements – Agamemnon and his “sperm,” the chthōn,Footnote ⁶¹ and even a German tag (“Gott mit uns”) that Pound assigns here to the chorus – will be redeployed to opposite ends in the Pisan Cantos and Elektra.

Pound’s alignment with Klytemnestra is also suggested by the word which he grants her in her beacon-lights speech. Again unlike in his later Elektra, where he highlights the maternal imagery surrounding Klytemnestra, here he avoids her own reliance on such imagery for conveying the chain of lights stretching from Troy to Mycenae. For example, in Aeschylus the night is said to give birth to light, both naturally in the form of dawn (line 265) and technologically, through this network (line 279). Instead Pound has Klytemnestra only name a litany of Greek places with no comment, as if this is a roll call of the ancient world (similar to that in H.D.’s roughly contemporaneous poem “Islands”) that she is bringing to speech and thus to life (and to light). “Ain’t you never heard of the TELegraph!” she yells at the hapless chorus, using a word that embodies what it speaks of (“Opening” 119). Aeschylus’s phaos … tēlepompon (far-sent light [line 300]) is a neologism, in both species and genus: Such tēl- compounds don’t seem to have been used before to name something like a technological device.Footnote ⁶² This is an exemplary case of literature staying “NEWS,” with Aeschylus announcing the birth of the telegraph, “a system for the rapid transmission of messages by relayed visual signals,” two thousand years in advance.Footnote ⁶³ We have already seen the resonances of the telegraph in Pound’s early thought; here its alignment with translation becomes more explicit. As Tiffany puts it, “the original arrives from a distant realm of secrecy and silence…. All translation, in this respect, is telegraphic; whatever reaches us does so from afar,” and so it reaching us at all is “nothing short of miraculous.”Footnote ⁶⁴ What succeeds in getting transmitted in the “Opening” is less the coming of Agamemnon – the translation stops too soon for that anyway – but the fact of Aeschylus’s Greece itself, in its geographic specificity. That it’s the ambivalent figure of Klytemnestra who reads the telegraphic message – ecstatic at the news but only so that she can finally undo “the glory that was Greece” herself – may also have attracted the equally ambivalent Pound.

Indeed, Pound’s other noteworthy word choice in this scene provides a much less optimistic account of the transmission of other voices. We are now in the part of the passage that was given in Browning’s translation in the essay: “Troia do the Achaioi hold, this same day. / I think a noise – no mixture – reigns i’ the city / Sour wine and unguent pour thou in one vessel.”Footnote ⁶⁵ There Pound doesn’t re-translate the last two lines, but makes two proposals for the first: the more literal “Troy is the Greeks’,” which he rejects as “an ambiguity for the ear,” and “Know that our men are in Ilion” (LE 268). In his “Opening” he settles for the emphatic and shoutable “The Greeks are IN!,” while the following lines are more innovatively rendered: “There’s a mix up in Troy town tonight, a salad / There is, and some dressin’, some racket!” (119). The Greek likens the boēn amikton (line 321), the unmixed (and unmixable, fundamentally different) noise or racket of the winners’ and losers’ screams, to oil and vinegar keeping apart if poured in the same vessel.Footnote ⁶⁶ Pound’s mixed-up salad, besides being an apt interpolation given the alimentary metaphor and the screams of the hungry Greeks, reflects also the mixing of a common word for wine/vinegar (oxos) and a rare one for anointing oil (aleiphar, a Homeric word). Pound’s “dressin’” and “racket” are, in contrast, common words. Each, though, has multiple contexts of signification: “dress,” a range of meanings including a specifically military one which is no doubt evoked here, “racket,” two distinct definitions arising from distinct etymologies. This “salad” is not only the result of irreconcilable differences between languages (even if they are languages of screams or “noise”), but also, within Greek and within English, an indicator of the absence of transparency in a single language. Fittingly, the very next word in Pound is an attempt at an interlingual pun that would mix the languages after all. Having named the “House of Atreus” a few lines above, he now describes the racket in Troy as “ATrocities” (119). This multilingualism, whose existence and necessity Pound would frequently note,Footnote ⁶⁷ runs the danger, however, of plunging the poet into the abyss of language (as Benjamin said of Hölderlin), or of disintegrating into a word salad – which may be the reason why neither this translation nor that of Elektra was ever published.

When Pound reflects on his attempt to translate the Agamemnon in his February 1923 “Paris Letter” for the Dial, he does so in terms of such a failure, specifically focusing on the inability to reflect Greek sound. In contrast to his earlier, more reserved praise for the play and for Aeschylus, now Pound claims that “The Agamemnon drives one to admiration; it is a great work” (P&P 4, 284). Yet, when he juxtaposes his own Agamemnon with Jean Cocteau’s “heroic attempt” in translating Sophocles’ Antigone, he reveals his ambivalence once again and elaborates on the difficulties of translation. On the one hand, he praises Cocteau for his radical condensation of Sophocles’ play. But on the other, he draws our attention to the importance of the seemingly superfluous, of what Cocteau has, presumably, given up on:

Pound sees the Greek as too much and too little, or too good and too faulty. What in Greek served either the “melodic value” (LE 273) or the theatrical transmission of emotional intensity – the repetition of the Greek takeover of Troy or Klytemnestra’s roundabout justifications of the murder – turns into ornament when translated, into a no longer vital excess of archaism that kills the translator’s mother tongue. But this is only one side of the story. Even near the end of the 1919 Aeschylus essay and despite his advocating throughout for reductions in translation, Pound had clarified that it was “a reading version” which “might omit various things” (for example, the verbosity, the syntactic agglutination), while those same “things” would nonetheless be useful “if the English were actually to be sung on stage, or chanted to the movements of the choric dance or procession” (LE 273). That is, were Pound to overcome his resistance to the theater and think of the plays qua plays, with the potential to transfix their audience as Sarah Bernhardt had transfixed him, his whole view of them could be utterly transformed.

Pound had been thinking about prosody in the year after the “Hellenist Series,” renewing his 1912 call for the necessity of experimentation with quantitative meter. Though he granted that “the laws of Greek quantitative prosody do not correspond with an English reality” (as the Abbé Rousselot’s phonograph had definitively shown according to Pound), he still maintained that, despite the inevitable failure, “no English poet has seriously tried to write quantitative verse without by this effort improving his cadence.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Pound suggests that a rite of passage through the foreign and especially the Greek (similar to his own in Ripostes) is necessary for English poets. By becoming aware of what is impossible in English, they might also realize what is possible beyond the iambic pentameter – especially since the phonograph had also supposedly proven that English prosodic “rules” have “no sort of relation to spoken reality.”Footnote ⁶⁹ The reason, that is, for this re-examination of prosody is not merely stylistic. Meter and matter are intertwined: “the best MECHANISM for breaking up … literary idiom IS a different meter, the god damn iambic magnetizes certain verbal sequences.”Footnote ⁷⁰

It is in this light that we should read Pound’s assessment of his Agamemnon. He regrets that rather than (re)produce the “‘vital equation’” – the quoted phrase comes from Pound’s own vorticist manifesto in GB, where he calls the image an “equation” – of the original, in which all the parts fall into place, he produces a text that fails to convey the unified, cohering whole because it is composed of fragments of artificially glued-together echoes of Greek that do not convey the “rush of the action” or the urgency of “Kassandra’s continual shrieking” (GB 92; LE 267). Pound would later write to Mary Barnard that

Pound presents his difficulties with Aeschylus primarily in terms of a struggle with the living voice: “I tried every possible dodge, making the watchman a negro, and giving him a fihn Geoogiah voyce; making the chorus talk cockney, et cetera. This is a usual form of evasion in modern drama. Ibsen makes his people provincial … to get a ‘language’” (P&P 4, 284). The use of dialect may reinvigorate a stilted, overly literary mother tongue; but it is an evasion since, as Michael North has argued, it stems from a conservative impulse to return to one’s own “authentic” linguistic roots, rather than open up to otherness.Footnote ⁷² Yet the “fihn Geoogiah voice” signals not only Pound’s attempt to superficially and problematically embody his characters, but primarily his attempt to reproduce “the prosody.” In 1920, he would lament the difficulty of “indicating the exact tone and rhythm with which one’s verse is to be read.”Footnote ⁷³ In the 1919 “Opening,” the transcription of a putative Black pronunciation had offered one solution to this problem: It served as a visual or written means to clarify the lengths of vowels in English monosyllables.Footnote ⁷⁴ His sonic translation strategy is most evident in the very beginning of the watchman’s speech, a passage that does not feature in Pound’s Aeschylus essay, where this concern with sound had been somewhat suppressed. For example, in the lines “Dey keep me up hyear lak a dawg / teh bark at de con-sterlations,” “to” has the lengthening aspirant attached to it; “dog” (and later “god”) is done with two letters to make the vowel register as long; the syllables in “constellations” are more clearly distinguished to allow for easier scanning (“Opening,” 118–19). Pound’s Agamemnon is a disaster by his own admission precisely because such transcriptions will not work consistently, especially if they appropriate a dialect from a cultural and historical context that does not fit the play’s own. This is where the TELegraph becomes a racket, and Pound, having contracted the Atreidae, fails his side of the contract: The Agamemnon (and Agamemnon) will lie “dead by this hand” until the Pisan Cantos.

Inventing Cocteau

At the end of his February 1923 “Paris Letter,” Pound outlines his own version of hellenism, echoing the terms of that never-republished final segment of the “Hellenist Series”: “the classics will live as long as people can take their symbols as equivalent of some current struggle which they are unable to treat more directly, or with greater exactness of balance despite the baggage” (P&P 4, 287). It is the contemporary context that imbues the “classic” with (use) value (as H.D. was already showing through her Sappho), and translation may be a second-rate enterprise, a last resort only if one cannot treat the current matter directly or imagistically.Footnote ⁷⁵ His suggestion for translation then would be what he himself claimed to have done in his Homage to Sextus Propertius (and what he may have been trying to replicate with his Klytemnestra): Zooming in on and perhaps enhancing the Roman poet’s anti-imperialist stance to mirror his own hostility towards the British Empire, Pound recreates the ancient “symbol” by finding a signified that would fit the text’s signifier.Footnote ⁷⁶ These are exactly the terms in which Pound praises Cocteau’s adaptations of tragedy into what he calls “the ‘modern equivalent,’” as against his own (P&P 4, 285).

Cocteau sought to translate Antigone as if attempting to “photograph Greece from an aeroplane.”Footnote ⁷⁷ He specified that the chorus – reduced in the first production, per Pound’s description, to “a set of masks, hung over a canvas temple” and a megaphone voiced by Cocteau himself (P&P 4, 285) – should speak quickly, “as if reading a newspaper article.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In 1923 Pound emphasizes the imagist principles undergirding Cocteau’s version – condensation, rapidity, “simple and direct speech” – which presumably allow him to mostly get beyond the “pasteboard and glue” (P&P 4, 285, 287). He thus succeeds in bringing forth the play’s image, encapsulated in a key phrase that, as Pound would later claim, “rings out in the Paris play house with all the force any man ever imagined inherent in greek [sic] originals” (GK 93). This line forges the crucial link to the present moment:

“The control” thinks of itself as the standard, and thus any appeal to something else is relegated to the status of novelty or invention when in fact, as much in Antigone’s case as in Cocteau’s, the “new” thing is actually quite old. So, Antigone tells Creon that the unwritten rules of the immortals which she defends “sont de toujours.”Footnote ⁷⁹ In broadcasting these words again in Paris in 1922, Cocteau makes a similar case for the “eternal” words of Sophocles as well. By 1935’s “Cocteau Sociologist,” and apropos of the Frenchman’s version of Oedipus in La machine infernale, Pound principally admires Cocteau because of “the amount of his time he contains” (SP 436). But it is still Antigone’s advocacy for the established yet forgotten rites that becomes proof of his inventive power, the mark of the playwright’s own great achievement: “Neither Yeats nor Pirandello could attain the: ‘T’as inventé la justice.’ in Cocteau’s Antigone” (SP 435).Footnote ⁸⁰

The French dramatist is further celebrated as a man who acts, now in contrast to the passive Pound and Eliot; the locus of competition is not drama or poetry, but Greek.

Cocteau’s chorus reading quickly from the ancient Greek newspaper is now proof that literature is “news that STAYS news,” Antigone as much of an ephèbe as she ever was, while Cocteau himself remains “the livest thing in Paris 1933” (433). Pound seems to assume – quoting Rémy de Gourmont in French – that Cocteau is able to achieve his much-vaunted “concision” (“limpidity” in Pound’s English translation of Gourmont) because of his “perfect acquaintance” with Greek (Gourmont actually says “l’abondance des idées”) (435). Pound’s somewhat inaccurate translation of Gourmont leads to an erratic series of remarks:

Cocteau reaches limpidity because he knows Greek so well that he can be like an airplane flying over the text – offering what Walter Benjamin would call “Kritik” – instead of stumbling through it, prodding and poking every word, like Pound, who at best would (did?) produce a commentary.Footnote ⁸¹ But then knowledge of Greek seems irrelevant to the nature of Cocteau’s achievement, and is in fact separated from the drama itself, which, Pound seems to imply here, exceeds the language that it’s written in. Having thus undercut his own reasoning for his failure to transform “father Aeschylus” into an “ephèbe,” he turns it into a problem of audience reception: Unlike Pound, Cocteau is perceived as knowing enough Greek (including by Pound himself just now, who forgot his French in order to convey this potentially mistaken impression), and so no one slings mud at him when he attempts to radically interpret Sophocles.

Already in a 1921 review of Cocteau’s poetry, prior to the Antigone, Pound had somewhat surprisingly articulated the distinction between their literary aims in terms of Greek.

Cocteau’s distant reading, his “quality of perceptive intelligence,” is what allows him to penetrate Sophocles’ play and convey it in a way that is appropriate to the Paris of 1922, just as in his poetry he “gives the feel of the age; and indicates the mode and modality of its hurrying ideation.” But as the 1923 “Paris Letter” on Aeschylus implies, and this poetry review makes clear, there is a trade-off. Though he conveys the Greek force in French, Cocteau misses both the Greek and presumably the French words in their specificity, cultivating the rapid sliding – “the dance of the intellect” – from one to the next that characterizes logopoeia, rather than the sonic resonances of melopoeia: “As melopoeia possibly nil, yet logopoeia certainly,” Pound’s 1921 review opens. What Cocteau provides, then, does not “contain the whole of art,” and, the review concludes in the same conspiratorial tones in which it began, implicitly insisting on the value of close (Greek) reading: “you and I are very possibly against the age” that Cocteau both embodies and represents so well. By the time tragedy and Cocteau resurface contiguously in his prose over a decade after the “Paris Letter,” Pound’s view of art has changed; his insistence on what could be construed as art for art’s sake has subsided, while “action” is emphasized. As a result he is less ambivalent about Cocteau’s contributions, and more polemical in his argument for Cocteau’s success with Greek tragedy through distant reading. Indeed, Pound seems ready to take a page from Cocteau’s (and in fact Eliot’s) playbook and not read that closely himself. For the pillar in the foundation of his monument to Cocteau turns out to have been Pound’s own invention.

“T’as inventé la justice,” the line Pound returns to again and again, is actually not to be found in Cocteau’s Antigone.Footnote ⁸³ The closest we get to it is not through Creon but through the chorus. They are the ones to tell Antigone that “C’est ta faute. Tu as violenté la justice. Tu payes encore pour Oedipe.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The passage is more sympathetic and less accusatory in Greek, where the chorus focus less on Antigone’s violation (and Cocteau’s violenter is even stronger than that) of Creon’s laws and more on her own self-violation at the feet of justice (lines 853–56). Pound’s misreading – or, more likely, mishearing – aligns with how he wanted to understand the play, both in 1923 and in 1935, as representing the revolutionary cry of the individual against the state. And he wanted to see it, despite its tragic contours, in a constructive light: Antigone as the promoter of ancient values and Cocteau as the (re-)inventor of a new-old possibility for justice. But Cocteau is more cynical than that and amplifies Antigone’s status as an oppositional figure (with respect to Creon, but also to everyone else onstage) – and in this case as a “violator” or even “rapist” – without suggesting there is anything constructive there besides the mere fact of opposition. (The Pléiade editors, for example, emphasize this Antigone’s “anarchism.”)Footnote ⁸⁵ The line is a “key phrase” because, in Pound’s remembered hearing, it both encapsulates the spirit of the play (embodying Creon’s ignorance/blindness, Antigone’s opposition, and her adherence to an old/new law), and its translator’s/interpreter’s intervention. That the line itself exists only in Pound’s faulty memory fittingly marks his own contribution to this interpretive chain where the old becomes new, and the violence inherent in that process (whether to the potentially valid perspective that Creon or the chorus represent, or to Antigone herself, or, outside the play’s plot, to Sophocles’ play on Cocteau’s part) is blotted out, and re-branded as invention. In 1935, this is no longer a problem for Pound, at least publicly, and indeed is proof that, as he puts it in 1938’s Guide to Kulchur, “greek drama exists,” despite his, Eliot’s, H.D.’s, and Gilbert Murray’s failures, because Cocteau’s “sheer genius has resurrected it” (93).

Sweeney and the “silent man in mocha brown”

Though Pound remained haunted by his failure of Agamemnonic translation, Eliot had dispatched Agamemnon much more readily in the late 1910s. The play remains a touchstone for him through the 1930s, but he is both less conflicted about its value and less interested in its textual resurrection. His transmutation of the play in “Sweeney among the Nightingales,” a poem arising out his close collaboration with Pound, enables him to lay out a future pathway of approach to Greek tragedy that falls between Greek with tears (to amend Eliot’s own formulation; see p. 99 above) and the lowly, inadequate art of translation. Like Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan,” much of Eliot’s Poems, 1920, in which “Nightingales” was published, interrogates the impact of history (be it artistic, social, or religious) on contemporary praxis. Unlike in Yeats’s “Leda,” the “brute blood of the air” is not quite as masterful. The (dis)connection between the past and the present is usually framed more precisely as a tension between a contemporary or in any case later idealized projection of the past and an unblinkered view of a decaying, vulgar, or “dry” present. So, for example, “Sweeney Erect” (P 36–37) begins with the demand for a neoclassical painting of rocks, seas, and mythological figures. The specific instructions for the scene, however, already hint at our speaker’s attitudes towards this prospect: The setting is a “cavernous waste shore” “in the unstilled Cyclades,” so unstilled in fact that the sea itself has become Scylla (“snarled and yelping”). The figures involved are defeated by their own powers: Aeolus “review[s]” winds that are “insurgent,” Ariadne’s hair is “tangle[d],” and Nausicaa’s morning stirrings doom her to a meeting not with kingly Odysseus but with the Cyclops Polyphemus. From this only seemingly idyllic landscape that is demanded of art (as deceptive as Theseus’s “perjured sails,” also mentioned), we move to a present indicative description of Sweeney qua “orang-outang” rising “from the sheets in steam.” The past isn’t only thematically addressed in the volume, but materially as well; most clearly in poems like “Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar” and “Gerontion,” the verse is formed by a tissue of quotations, fragments shored against the poet’s wartime and postwar ruins. This version of the burden of the past is the inverse of the “perjured” neoclassicism because it is nearly imperceptible.

“Sweeney among the Nightingales” (P 51–52) registers a sense of the past in both of these ways, by framing the plight of Sweeney and/or of the “silent man in mocha brown” through Agamemnon, whose dying cry appears as the epigraph, and who is mentioned by name in the last stanza. The implication is not only that Sweeney’s doings are not as significant as Agamemnon’s – there does not even seem to be a murder, which in the Yeatsian context would count as a disappointment – but also that Agamemnon, lecherous husband of Klytemnestra coming home with his concubine Kassandra, famous for sacrificing his own daughter and for having caused the deaths of thousands by claiming Briseis from Achilles, was probably a Sweeney. Besides the explicit reference to Aeschylus and the deployment of the ultimate poetic trope of the nightingale,Footnote ⁸⁶ the poem contains possible allusions to Kipling, Schubert, Marlowe, Milton, alongside borrowings from lesser-known contemporary sources.Footnote ⁸⁷ This isn’t a world of lack, but of surfeit. There are too many words, too many bodies, too many stories, and none of them meaningful: “polyphiloprogenitive … superfetation of τὸ ἕν,” to quote “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service” (P 49).

Eliot later insisted on publicly calling the poem a “modern painting, abstract and impersonal,” a “still life” or “a series of images,”Footnote ⁸⁸ thus aligning it with, for example, Pound’s own presentation of his cantos around this time as “images” from a long poem. In typical Eliotic fashion, he resisted any easy analogies between the images presented and the mythical backdrop, and did so even privately: In the margins of a scholarly book that proposed Rachel as Klytemnestra and the man in mocha brown as Orestes, he is reported to have written “nonsense” (P 541). Yet dismissing the Aeschylean frame obscures the poem’s touted “seriousness.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The most productive way to read it, I think, is in terms of the interactions of its details with the Agamemnon and tragedy more broadly. The poem already functions as Eliot’s response to Pound’s request (whether pre-emptively or consciously makes little difference) that he translate the Agamemnon and provides the pattern for Eliot’s subsequent treatment of Greek materials, exceeding the ironic interplay between opposed realms that the rest of the volume operates within. The Oresteia as a whole is a perfect set of plays through which to think about the relation between past and present in the life of an individual, as well as about the constitution of a community or a polity, and that is how Eliot uses it from 1918 until The Family Reunion twenty years later.

Like other poems in the volume, “Nightingales” originally had an Elizabethan epigraph in addition to the Aeschylean one: “Why should I speak of the nightingale? The nightingale sings of adulterate wrong.”Footnote ⁹⁰ De-emphasizing the orientation towards “adultery” and “adulteration” – the former unavoidable in any poem featuring Agamemnon, the latter part of the decadence motifs featured throughout Poems, 1920 – Eliot draws our attention away from questions of morality or pathos to the words of the Greek epigraph itself: ὤμοι, πέπληγμαι καιρίαν πληγὴν ἔσω (line 1343). It is left untranslated, but two key features reverberate in the poem: its last word, ἔσω (esō) ‘in, inside,’ and the polyptoton of πέπληγμαι (peplēgmai) ‘I am struck’ and πληγήν (plēgēn) ‘strike, blow, wound.’ Agamemnon’s dying exclamation works in two ways. It is both a description of his state – he is literally struck “inside,” stabbed – and a moment of illumination; he realizes that the danger he thought was outside (in the war, or the journey back) and had been overcome was actually lurking inside the house. “Nightingales” itself is a poem about boundaries and their crossing: limits of space but also of the self. After the initial, species-crossing description of “Apeneck Sweeney” with “zebra-stripe[d]” jaw “swelling to maculate giraffe,” the poem shifts to the sky (“the circles of the stormy moon”), its bird’s-eye view encompassing South America (“the River Plate”) and “the shrunken seas,” zooms in to the house where the poem’s events take place, then exits again to the natural space of “the bloody wood.” The two female protagonists are inside, but the rest of the characters are positioned at thresholds or points of entry: Sweeney “guards the horned gate,” the man in mocha brown is initially “at the window-sill” and then outside the window, the waiter “brings in oranges,” the “host” is “at the door.” Both central male figures attempt to extend their own boundaries: Sweeney “spreads his knees” too much (given that the person trying to sit on his knees falls down), the silent man “sprawls,” but then “contracts.”

The rhetorical device of the polyptoton is a way of dramatizing that tension between inside and outside on the level of the word by presenting it in various grammatical forms. But in the way that Eliot transforms it in his poem, it also becomes a way of embodying the question of the relationship between past and present. Like almost all the poems in the volume, “Nightingales” is rhymed abcb; twice the unrhymed sound in a stanza’s first line returns in a later stanza, once becoming the rhymed sound. In an echo of the part–whole form the polyptoton structure takes in πληγήν–πέπληγμαι, exactly half of Eliot’s rhyme pairs rhyme a monosyllabic with a disyllabic word, including the first and last ones: laugh–giraffe, aloud–shroud.Footnote ⁹¹ In addition to this strong rhyme patterning, g’s are especially prominent (in words like “giraffe,” “guards,” “gate,” “gloomy,” “gambit,” “golden,” “grin,” and in the rhymes of “gapes–grapes,” and “league–fatigue”), surely to build up to both “nightingale” and “Agamemnon,” which will appear at the end of the poem, but also to echo the repeated Greek gamma in the epigraph. Several words are repeated (“knees,” “window,” “brown,” “silent,” “grapes,” “cape,” “man”), and those that don’t repeat exactly still have their sounds rearranged as the poem moves along, as seen most clearly in s-words (perhaps to echo ἔσω): Sweeney – spreads – stripes – swelling – circles – slide – shrunken seas – Spanish – sit – slips – she – stocking – silent – sprawls – sill – silent – she – suspect – circumscribe – singing – sacred – sang – siftings – stain – stiff – shroud. Nothing appears in the body of the poem without eerily making its presence felt again, and that is especially true of the haunting sound of Greek that so obsessed Pound. The past is inescapable even on the minutest level.

Similarly to this chain of slightly shifting sounds, the Aeschylean parallels are also just slightly shifted. Sweeney guards the gate, so he is the equivalent of the Mycenean watchman, on whom the play opens. Aeschylus compares him to a dog (kynos dikēn, line 3, a phrase that will echo throughout Pound’s work), and so in the course of Eliot’s first stanza he becomes an ape, a zebra, and a giraffe. As Agamemnon’s watchman looks at the sky, hoping to see, then seeing “the signal-flame” (line 8) transmitted from Troy to Greece, so the poem takes us on a tour of the night sky, and shows us the “circles” of the significance-laden “stormy moon” appropriately moving “westward.” As the watchman moans and cries for the misfortunes of the house of Atreus (line 18), so the poem records “Death and the Raven” and “Gloomy Orion.” The watchman’s speech ends surprisingly: Though he has seen the light and is rushing to announce the news to Klytemnestra, he hints that this is not the end of the house’s troubles. But a proverbial ox is on his tongue, and he chooses to remain silent on the details (lines 36–37). In Eliot we are told that “Gloomy Orion and the Dog” are in fact “veiled,” while the seas are “hushed.”

The gender of “the person in the Spanish cape” that attempts to seduce Sweeney – who despite not having been recorded as moving, seems now to form part of the “inside” scene, sliding into the role of Agamemnon – is withheld for five lines, as may be fitting for “manly” Klytemnestra.Footnote ⁹² The famous purple cloths that she lays down for Agamemnon (lines 908–10) make a parodic appearance here in the guise of the “table cloth” that “the person in the Spanish cape” pulls on to steady herself as she falls from Sweeney’s knees. The second of the two ladies “thought to be in league” appears later and, unlike the first woman’s attempt at action, “Rachel née Rabinovitch” only “Tears at the grapes with murderous paws” – much like Aegisthus who makes his appearance late and is mocked by the chorus for not having the courage to execute the murder himself (line 1635) despite his claims of being its mastermind. Unlike Klytemnestra, moreover, Aegisthus is consistently feminized in tragedy, including in Agamemnon, where the chorus first address him as “woman” (line 1625). The odd use of Rachel’s maiden name without a last name recalls the typical Greek use of patronymics (note too that Eliot has selected a maiden name, Rabinovitch, that could be broadly recognized as meaning “child of”),Footnote ⁹³ which is especially relevant in this case since Aegisthus claims to be avenging his father in conspiring to murder Agamemnon.Footnote ⁹⁴ The (adapted) Aeschylean setup is thus complete.

Yet the poem is equally interested in the “silent man in mocha brown,” who is the only one to undergo some kind of development. His initial “sprawl” suggests he is eager to take in the scene – he “gapes,” though whether he is looking in or out the window isn’t clear – and to be absorbed in it, as evidenced in the loss of his somewhat specific qualities when he becomes a “silent vertebrate in brown” (my emphasis). But he is then quickly transformed into “the man with heavy eyes” who “contracts, and concentrates, withdraws,” as if he’s seen this play before and is both wary and weary of extending himself into it. So, knowing that the danger is “in,” he “Declines the gambit, shows fatigue,” and “Leaves the room.” He doesn’t go far. Instead, he chooses to become a proper spectator: He “reappears / Outside the window, / leaning in,” his “golden grin” framed by “Branches of wistaria.” No one in the Aeschylean story “declines the gambit”; everyone, even the absent Orestes, is catastrophically drawn in (much as Sweeney is in the poem). The one(s) looking in through the window at this unfolding drama are us, the modern audience. The modern – and not ancient – audience, because what the last few stanzas depict is a gradual loss of interest: The characters no longer have names and are barely discernible (“The host with someone indistinct / Converses”), and thus easily metaphorized (“The nightingales are singing”), whether comically (nightingale = prostitute) or tragically (nightingale = Philomel/Kassandra/the poet).

The transformation of the man from “silent vertebrate” with “heavy eyes” to a stylized, somewhat Dionysian figure presiding over the scene heightens the theatrical connotations; after all, he is also framed, circumscribed, by both window and ivy-substituting wisteria. At the same time, he now recalls Eliot’s other Priapian outsider: Mr. Apollinax, who was last seen “grinning over a screen / with seaweed in [his] hair” in Prufrock and Other Observations (P 25). Whatever is happening inside thus becomes an equivalent of “the palace of Mrs. Phlaccus” or the house of “Professor Channing-Cheetah.” Whereas Mr. Apollinax enters and disturbs the universe with his “dry and passionate talk” (“‘But after all what did he mean?’” “‘He must be unbalanced,’” the other participants exclaim), the man’s disturbance here is the opposite. He exits and lets the situation unfold as it must and will, the present falling into the pattern of the past – Sweeney does after all sit at the gate of horn, which suggests that his premonitions are “true.”Footnote ⁹⁵ The silent man leaves discussion of the “nonsense” to the Channing-Cheetahs, much as Eliot himself declines to enter into Pound’s translational struggles with Aeschylus. The poem, that is, in this reading, dramatizes Eliot’s own relationship to the ancient play: There are only blows to be felt if one engages with the details within. (No Greek without tears after all.)

The specific relation between present and past thus continues to be left ambiguous in the last stanzas: The nightingales “are singing” now and “sang within the bloody wood,” but the line and stanza breaks that intervene between those two statements, as well as the absence of any markers of continuity or resemblance (e.g., “as they sang” or “are still singing”) suggest at best that the relation between those two acts of singing is yet to be determined, and at worst, that there is no relation except for near-contiguity. However, despite his dismissal as “nonsense” of the alignments between his poem’s characters and those of Aeschylus, Eliot did seem eager for another mythical element to be noticed: namely, his displacement of the murder, or at least the body of Agamemnon, from the bath (mentioned in the volume’s previous poem, where the last stanza depicts Sweeney as he “shifts from ham to ham / Stirring the water in his bath”) to the “bloody wood” in this poem’s last stanza.Footnote ⁹⁶ Perhaps Eliot sought to draw attention to it because this is the poem’s final outing, and its potential source of positive meaning. His Agamemnon’s murder takes place outside and is public rather than private, a performance for the benefit of an audience that the poem has already constructed through its nondescript man-in-brown-turned-Dionysus – as of course all the participants would be in accounts of Dionysiac ritual by Nietzsche and then Harrison. This final stanza could, then, function as the last step in the Dionysian–Harrisonian vegetation ritual that Eliot is staging, where the intricacies of plot and language don’t much matter. The old king/god has been sacrificed, the body has been planted – covered over but also potentially fertilized by centuries of lyrical (“liquid”) siftings – and we are all waiting to see whether it has “begun to sprout” as it did in the past (to quote from the end of The Waste Land i; P 57).Footnote ⁹⁷

Eliot gestures to both the Oresteia’s end, where the sacred grove of the Eumenides is established, and also to the later Oedipus at Colonus, which takes place at that grove – and indeed, this is the image evoked at the conclusion of Eliot’s last play, The Elder Statesman. He thus highlights the potential role of drama in sanctifying space and constructing a political or communal identity out of many disparate strands: just as Furies and Olympians are reconciled, just as Oedipus finds a final resting place and his native Thebes/Corinth are both succored by Athens, and just as the Mycenean Agamemnon saga and the Theban Oedipus saga become connected in this very Athenian form of Greek tragedy that pulled all myths to itself. (And, of course, in Murder in the Cathedral, Eliot would transpose it all to an actual sacred site; there too, though the murder happens indoors, the chorus speak of “the blood of Thy martyrs and saints” which “Shall enrich the earth, shall create the holy places,” and “the sanctity shall not depart from it” [CPP 221].) But if a reinvigoration of ritual or of art is to take place – and the poem is not suggesting that it will, given the cutting critique present in the entire volume of Poems, 1920 and the fact that, unlike in Eliot’s book of essays The Sacred Wood, the wood here is still “bloody” – the way towards it is not by going in deep, but by staying out.Footnote ⁹⁸ After all, it may have been Agamemnon who “cried aloud” in his hard-to-parse Greek, but it is his “stiff dishonoured shroud” that we have: the shroud that the nightingales (whether poetic or not) build their edifice upon, and the “shroud” of his Greek, too, since, according to Eliot, we cannot hope to access a “native” or living understanding of the language (and thus the Greek of the epigraph remains as a kind of symbol of what once was).Footnote ⁹⁹ Eliot’s dismissal of specific parallels with the Agamemnon makes sense in this context; “Nightingales” is a poem almost proudly not using Agamemnon, declining to enter its particular world, while retaining some interest in the ritual form it embodies and exemplifies. This is precisely how Eliot would treat Greek drama for the next forty years.

“What is to be our philosophy?”: Pound and Eliot’s Dramatic Rapprochement in the 1930s

The Agamemnon resonates throughout Eliot’s work of this period. As with tragedy more broadly in his Noh review, it is against this play that he often hones his ideas about both poetry and the theater, attempting to “draw sustenance from the dead” while maintaining some critical distance. It is the Agamemnon that serves as one of his main examples for the artistic process of transmutation of emotion in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Compared to Dante’s, the Aeschylean transmutation is incomplete: “In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator” (just as it does in “Nightingales”) (CP 2, 110). There is still too much possible identification, too much personality left over in the translation from world to work. Aeschylean drama may be fundamentally formal – enacted between styles of utterance – rather than psychological or character-based: “every style of utterance in the play bears a relation to the whole and because of this relation is dramatic in itself” (CP 2, 504). But even so, “the words which we read, are symbols, a shorthand … for the actual and felt play, which is always the real thing” (CP 3, 197). In this account, what Greek drama points to is a concrete reality of “life”; it is admired because it manages to do so with relatively limited means and with reliance on form, in contrast to the elaborate, naturalistic sets and stagings of modern plays. But for Eliot’s own purposes in the 1920s, the Roman drama of Seneca might be preferable for it is more formal still; there “the drama is all in the word, and the word has no further reality behind it” (CP 3, 197). Seneca dispenses with even that implied reality behind Greek plays, stimulating the audience’s imaginative and perhaps religious faculties even more fully. We see in such statements the roots of Eliot’s later distant reading of Greek tragedy in his own plays. He offers an X-ray of the plot – as a formal structure that is guaranteed to “work” since it has held people’s attention for two thousand years – over which new words are “made flesh.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Eliot’s next attempt to convert the Agamemnon to poetic use – and to get beyond it – falls along these lines: The fragmentary Sweeney Agonistes is a highly stylized, verbally and musically inventive “Aristophanic comedy.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ Notwithstanding the difference in form, there are still Aeschylean overtones to the play. The epigraph is from the Libation Bearers, the next play in the Oresteia, but the citation is in English, doubly marking Eliot’s need for a definitive exit from Greek: “You don’t see them, you don’t – but I see them: / they are hunting me down, I must move on” (CPP 74, my emphasis). Similarly his Sweeney, though continuous with the Sweeney of Poems, 1920 and still (intentionally) lacking in psychological depth, has acquired a modicum of self-awareness and a stronger sense of his entrapment in a fallen world. The play’s language is occasionally akin to that Pound was trying on for his translation of Agamemnon’s opening, though without the distortions in spelling that would force a particular kind of quantitative reading and without the violent jamming together of registers. But Eliot has also hit upon another compositional strategy that would prove important to Pound. Richards traces the play’s main takeaway – namely, Sweeney’s insistence that “life is death” – to Aristophanes, in whose metatheatrical Frogs Dionysus teases Euripides with a line from one of his own plays: τὸ ζῆν μέν ἐστι κατθανεῖν (“living is dying,” the opposite refrain from Pound’s Elektran “the / DEAD / don’t / DIE”).Footnote ¹⁰² If this is the case, Eliot is doing exactly what Pound would praise in Cocteau and seek to do himself: developing a play out of and through the translation of a single image and “moral conviction,” or key phrase. Indeed, despite Pound’s initial skepticism about the turn to “Aristophane” in the Waste Land letters of 1922, when the two fragments of Sweeney are published for the first time in October 1926/January 1927, he writes approvingly to Eliot (L-TSE 3, 644), and subsequently refers to this text as the high-water mark of Eliot’s theatrical achievement.

But Eliot succeeds – if he does – because he pays little attention to other words or elements of his “originals.” In using this Aristophanic line, in which the god of tragedy essentially condemns the last tragedian, Eliot once again declines the gambit. Greek drama, if followed even as closely (yet still loosely) as Sweeney Agonistes follows it, leads to the dead end in which the characters find themselves at the end of the second fragment – “And perhaps you’re alive / And perhaps you’re dead” – before language disintegrates and terror materializes in the form of a final series of “KNOCK”s on the door (CPP 85). They remain stuck in a world where the necessary cleansing evoked by St. John of the Cross in the play’s second epigraph cannot yet take place. But even if in this play the characters cannot get from being pursued by the Furies to the divestment from earthly things, the coexistence of both epigraphs in English – this forceful, difference-muting conjunction of distinct theologies, times, and languages – points the way. This conjunction, more than anything stylistic or formal in Sweeney Agonistes itself, will guide Eliot’s later approach to the Eumenides in The Family Reunion.

In 1933 Sweeney was published in book form and performed at Vassar in Eliot’s presence. Aware of this Aristophanic resurgence and having received from Eliot a program for The Rock in May 1934, Pound returns to drama himself.Footnote ¹⁰³ He finds his discarded Agamemnon opening while correcting his Aeschylus essay for the 1934 publication of Make It New: Essays, and seems to send it on to Eliot; he even teasingly asks Eliot if he has the “beanopoly” on dramatic verse.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The essay bears a note, dated 1934, in which Pound emends his translation of Klytemnestra’s declaration of murder to “I did it. That’s how it is,” continuing to show interest in her particular voice (LE 270). The change betrays Cocteau’s influence: His Antigone admits to burying Polynices in the similarly declarative “Je l’ai fait. Je le déclare.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Klytemnestra’s line in Greek even concludes one of the Chinese Cantos also being composed at that time. Here, however, the shift in emphasis towards the values of Elektra and the Pisan Cantos has begun; the line is used to underline an unjust murder, which the peace-bringing, rebel-suppressing son, who “remembered his father / dead by the hand of Litse,” may avenge (58/323). That nothing more came of this second look at the Agamemnon may have further contributed to Pound’s renewed sense of failure evident in “Cocteau Sociologist” six months later. The apparent dismissal of Greek knowledge in that essay, though, is counterbalanced by Pound’s renewed Greek pursuits on other fronts. His obsessive metrical admonishments to Mary Barnard – “study … the MEDIUM, i;e; [sic] language and everything it consists of consonants, vowels, AND the relative duration of the different sounds, and of their agglomerates,” “really learn to write proper quantitative sapphics in the amurikan langwidge,” “STRICT metrical exercise” – suggest that his interest in Greek melopoeia continues unabated.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ While, moreover, Barnard is assigned the research into the “melodic value” of lyric, W. H. D. Rouse is charged with conveying the “sound of men’s voices” in epic.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Two Greek genres thus taken care of, Pound sets on spurring Eliot to work on the drama that might combine them.

On March 28, 1935, Pound sends Eliot “Song fer the Muses’ Garden,” a bawdy poem similar to the “Sage Homme” that commemorated the birth of The Waste Land:

If this too is intended as celebratory it is less clear what collaboration the two poets may be celebrating.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But, taken together with “Cocteau Sociologist” (published that January) and what Pound says there about the use of Greek, it is not farfetched to think that Pound’s intention is to start to prodding Eliot towards acting with respect to Greek again. (In the very same letter Pound expresses disappointment at Rouse not following his advice in his Odyssey translation.) Pound’s somewhat cryptic use of Oedipus as a mythical stand-in makes sense beyond Cocteau’s Infernal Machine, which is doubtless in both poets’ minds.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The willed though perverted appearance of the “sacred grove” in “Nightingales” suggests that Oedipus is part of their conversation about tragedy from the very beginning, and in connection to, or as a continuation of, Aeschylus. Both “Sage Homme” and “Song fer the Muses’ Garden” are mostly about friendship, and “Nightingales” marks the ultimate such act between them, with Pound’s “giving” his word “siftings” to Eliot before he got to use it in Mauberley. If a “boy’s best friend is his Oedipus” perhaps because he helps him dispatch his (poetic) ancestors, the boy himself is also like Theseus, in whose power it is to guide Oedipus towards absolution, towards a sacred space, in which he himself can then glory, leaving nothing for anyone else: “Ez Po and Possum / Have picked all the blossom,” or at least should do so.Footnote ¹¹⁰

All of the factors outlined above inspired Pound not only towards revisiting his Agamemnon opening, but also towards doing his own Sweeney-esque version of Oedipus, an undated, two-page draft of which is found among his papers.Footnote ¹¹¹ The few lines there are point to Oedipus at Colonus rather than Tyrannus; the curious but hesitant chorus who lack full knowledge of the story fit in better with the Athenian chorus of the later play rather than with the Theban chorus of the former, while their reference to the “Edipus complex” marks Pound’s intention to imbue the scene with the perspective of an even later time.Footnote ¹¹² The draft is more of an overture of friendship or invitation to collaboration towards Eliot (whether or not it was sent to him) than a rapprochement with Sophocles. The passage spoken by the chorus on the first page has been marked by Pound in holograph with “agon” and “antagonz,” forging a link to the Aristophanically minded Eliot, and with the suggestion that this is “Oedipus as Brer Devil heard it,” a further connection to Eliot. The Uncle Remus frame itself – though present only in the note and in the transcription of accent – is another attempt to “get a ‘language,’” this time not by attempting a stylistic merging between the two worlds but by a full transplanting, much like the ones Cocteau was gesturing towards, and Eliot had accomplished already in Sweeney Agonistes.

Eliot for his part has finally finished with the Agamemnon in 1935. His first complete – and most formalist – play, centers on an Agamemnonic Murder in the Cathedral,Footnote ¹¹³ uses an Aristophanic structure,Footnote ¹¹⁴ and moves closest to the Senecan ideal he had articulated in the late 1920s. Insofar as this is a historical play, but also because Thomas Becket’s sermon functions both within the play and within the theater, reality and fiction seem to be merged. But we are decisively not allowed to be fully absorbed in the events as they unfold and forget the present moment; the four murderous knights break the fourth wall, putting the question and onus of the archbishop’s murder onto us. With the Agamemnon thus transformed – indeed, literally converted – the silent men in mocha brown in the audience are now expected to enter back in and participate in the chorus’s verbal ritual of communal atonement.

When Pound congratulates Eliot on the play, he echoes the Waste Land letters of late 1921 to early 1922: “Congrats, you damn ole slowcoach,” he offers, and then quickly urges him not “to stay in the maternity ward for six months after the operation.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ He thus rhetorically ties this finally successful Agamemnon play to their earlier Aeschylus-haunted Waste Land collaboration, which allows him to overlook at least temporarily its religious content. His renewed optimism about Greek drama makes itself felt in Guide to Kulchur, where Pound acknowledges his own previous biases against tragedy, now placing the blame for its “lapse” squarely on the translator’s shoulders: “the translation is unreadable,” but “THE Agamemnon” “as an entity … stands rock-like” (92–93). Not yet cured of the Atreidae, Pound seems intrigued by the thought of diving back in. He even returns to the relationship between “living speech” and prosody: “Only true speech will hold the movement…. The moment you ruin the reality of the speech merely to fit a metre, all the precision is lost,” he writes to an unidentified correspondent in April 1938.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Though “some hellenists” abandoned this problem “years ago” by not working hard enough on “quantitative greek meters,” he leaves the door open to a new “metrical renaissane [sic] due to greek.”

In late 1937 to early 1938, Pound and Eliot again exchange letters on drama, prompted by Pound, in which they reaffirm their formalist and elitist principles.Footnote ¹¹⁷ But as soon as Eliot admits to having finished The Family Reunion, Pound remains unconvinced that his friend’s turn to “drammerdy” was not a “calamedy,”Footnote ¹¹⁸ and re-articulates his earlier critique of theater to other correspondents: The dramatic elements distract from the literary intensity.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The only way it might work is if the context is right; now Pound thinks of it less in terms of social adequation as in his writings on Cocteau in the mid-30s, and more as a combination of Eliot’s assessments in “Reflections on Vers Libre” and Storer’s 1917 connection between the possibility of tragedy/poetic drama and the presence of belief. As, for Eliot, Greek drama is primarily useful in thinking about communal religious experience – first focused on ritual in the Harrisonian mode, then more in tune with Christian liturgyFootnote ¹²⁰ – so now Pound writes, “one needs a total social revolution before one can set up real festivals of any kind. Drama religious, but not costume historique. Essence of religion is the present tense” (L 342). It is that sense of the present yet timeless that he had identified in Sarah Bernhardt’s performance and, differently, in Cocteau, still the only dramatist he will praise.

The question of belief is pressing for Pound in 1939; his plan for the last twenty-nine cantos is to “move on to philosophy and outline the kind of religion a healthy man can BELIEVE,”Footnote ¹²¹ and it is with Eliot he wants to discuss it.

Pound’s overture to Eliot – for them to again figure out together “what is to be our philosophy” and renew their earlier Greek work, which had led to Sweeney’s “Agon,” if to nothing else – is sealed by the reference to “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” Eliot’s own early attempt to depict their collaboration. It is odd Pound would be so attached to this dialogue, though some of its motifs are important for Eliot’s treatment of the Oresteia. It is probably the spirit in which it was written that made it most attractive,Footnote ¹²³ and the way in which it led Eeldrop/Eliot not to “spifferate” on his beliefs but to enact them in his Sweeney poems and in his fragmentary comedy. Indeed, Pound himself, in his 1916 review of Joyce’s Exiles, had prophetically called for a “real agonist” who would “write ‘drama’” exhibiting “a mind in search” instead of trying “to preach at you” (L/JJ 55–56). As Eeldrop says in the sentence following that quoted by Pound, “The essential is, that our philosophy should spring from our point of view and not return upon itself to explain our point of view…. We must avoid having a platform” (CP 1, 527–8). In 1920 Eliot would make a similar claim for Aeschylus in propria persona: “The Agamemnon, or Macbeth … are as much works of the ‘intellect’ as the writings of Aristotle”; they do not “embod[y] a philosophy” but are “a precise statement of life which is at the same time a point of view, a world” (CP 2, 280, 282). It is perhaps a position to which Pound wants to recall the now-devout and belief-spifferating Eliot; or, depending on how one interprets Pound’s last sentence above, to get Eliot to open up to Pound’s own recently formed beliefs. The stage is thus set for the new, belief-inflected realignment between American poetry and Greek tragedy during and after the Second World War.