Among the poems of E. E. Cummings which were collected together posthumously in Etcetera: The Unpublished Poems (Reference Cummings, Firmage and Kennedy1983) is a lightly written but savagely honest account of Ezra Pound, probably composed in the early 1940s.Footnote 1 This sharp poem seems not to have attracted scholarly comment, but it is well worth attention.Footnote 2 The poem is a Sapphic which takes aim at Pound's pretentious classicising aesthetic. Cummings’ modernist take on the Sapphic mocks Pound's own relationship to classical form. Cummings targets in particular Pound's idea of recreating classical quantitative metre in English, and in the process he formulates a larger account of the limitations of Pound as a poet.
Cummings’ Sapphic on Pound is remarkable for its willingness to confront the relationship between Pound's literary aesthetic and his fascist politics.Footnote 3 Most of Pound's circle shied away from confronting this essential problem – and indeed that includes Cummings, most of the time. Cummings was a prominent defender of Pound after his arrest, the abortive trial for treason, and his incarceration on grounds of insanity.Footnote 4 However, Cummings’ private feelings were more complicated, painful and convoluted.Footnote 5 Cummings left his Sapphic unpublished, but it now comes down to us as one of the most exact and incisive critiques of Pound's life and work.
Cummings’ poem refers to the ‘Sapphics’ of A. C. Swinburne as well as implicitly activating ‘Apparuit’, a poem written by Pound in Sapphic stanzas which imports into English verse the idea of a metre determined by syllable quantity. Pound and Cummings (as well as Swinburne) were all steeped in the Classics, and Classical poetry had a profound influence on all three writers.Footnote 6 Cummings’ Sapphic on Pound is explicit in its engagement with the Classics, openly naming its own form as Sapphic verse and punning on Latin words. Much of Cummings’ own relationship to the Classics is present in the comment which he constructs on Pound's involvement with the Classical tradition. Cummings’ poem is light and humourous, but it does not pull punches. It highlights the schoolboy pretentiousness and ineffectual snobbery of Pound's relationship to Classical metre. At the same time, it hints at the connection between Pound's classicising literary snobbery and his fascism. The ultimate cut: Pound's classicising pretentions left him dominated by the knowledge that he could never be the writer that Joyce was.
This paper begins with Cummings’ poem, which is dense and merits some unpicking. Section II then turns to Swinburne's ‘Sapphics’ and Pound's ‘Apparuit’ and considers the varying relationships to Sapphic metre and form shown by Swinburne, Pound and Cummings. Cummings’ poem comes out of the vile behaviour of Pound in Italy in the early 1940s, but it looks beyond its immediate historical context. With the advantage of Cummings’ own hindsight, the poem comments on issues which were central to the development of modernism in the 1910s. The modernist move towards free verse was connected to ideas about the natural rhythm and sound of words and the time required to pronounce syllables; these ideas were particularly associated with Pound, his literary circle, and his polemics about the nature of poetry. Cummings’ Sapphic distils into a twelve-line poem a moment in his own thinking about Pound, Joyce, and the development of modernism, raising issues also of language, elitism, and ownership of the Classical tradition. Cummings’ poem explores the limitations which are created for English verse when it snobbishly privileges the Classical tradition.
I. ‘the adventure of Our Ezra’
Cummings’ poem can be found in Etcetera: the unpublished poems under the rubric ‘Late Poems: 1930–1962’. The editors of Etcetera have not clearly dated the poems that appear within this broad three-decade span, in part perhaps because the process of reworking has not left an absolute chronology. However, it is implicit in the Sapphic that James Joyce is dead (this is explained further below), and Joyce's death gives a post quem of January 1941.Footnote 7
Like most of Cummings’ poetry, the poem is untitled. Here it is in full.
In approaching this oblique poem it may help to lay out first the main themes and central visual imagery, before turning to a more detailed analysis of the language.
The central visual image is that of Ezra Pound, in the posture of a dog, cocking his ear to the voice of James Joyce on the phonograph, which is ‘loosely called a / Victor Victrola’. The ‘Victor’ is a make of phonograph (from the Victor Talking Machine Company) of which the Victrola is a sub-division.Footnote 8 In order to unpick the poem, the reader needs to refer the imaginative eye to an image which was iconic when the poem was written and which is still somewhat familiar now. It is the image of ‘Little Nipper’, a stocky white dog with floppy brown ears and a red collar, tilting his head into the horn of a phonograph. Above the phonograph is emblazoned ‘Victor’ in a large splash of lettering and at the bottom of the image is written ‘HIS MASTER'S VOICE’. This is the branding ancestor of HMV Records, who still use a descendant of the old image.
The speaker in the poem addresses the reader directly and draws the reader's attention to the form of the poem (‘in / Sapphics quite dissimilar unto A.Swin / burne's). The strategy of openly alerting the reader to his poetic form distinguishes Cummings from the studied obscurity of Pound's verse, as well as signalling that form is central to reading the poem. The tone vis-à-vis Swinburne is respectful. Cummings was much influenced by Swinburne and other Decadent poets during his undergraduate years at Harvard.Footnote 9 But in spite of Swinburne's early influence on Cummings, the verse here is indeed markedly dissimilar to Swinburne's. Swinburne's style is decadent and aesthetising; Cummings’ style is jarring and almost pointedly unaesthetised.
Pound himself is described as pursuing ‘strictly aes / thetic ... subjects’. This links Pound with the aesthetised Swinburne and is perhaps even a swipe at Pound, suggesting that Pound's own relationship to Swinburne could be construed as derivative.Footnote 10 However, the idea that Pound's work is strictly aesthetic – if that means also apolitical – should not be taken at face value. That suggestion is itself undercut within the poem, in particular by the reader's own knowledge of ‘the adventure / of Our Ezra’ (discussed in more detail below).
Pound is described as a ‘delver in mines strictly aes / thetic(short aes long as it happens by ex / ception)subjects’. The reference to ‘short’ and ‘long’ implies Classical quantitative scansion, as opposed to the rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables which forms the basis for metre in English verse. Cummings’ emphasis on Sapphic form combines with these comments on metre, and together they direct the reader towards Pound's own Sapphic ‘Apparuit’, which is also Pound's only published foray into fully quantitative metre.Footnote 11
Our Ezra and other Ezras
The poem says nothing explicit about Pound's fascism. But what is ‘the adventure / of Our Ezra’? Any reader knows already what sort of adventure Ezra Pound has been on. He came from America (via Venice) to England, and then moved (via Paris) to Italy, where he lived for more than two decades. During the war, he promoted fascism and Mussolini, spewing poisonous anti-Semitism on the radio. Pound began writing radio scripts for others in 1940 and he began making his own broadcasts in January of 1941.Footnote 12 These broadcasts were not live, but pre-recorded, and so they may bear a connection to the choice of the phonograph as the central image in Cummings’ poem. Pound recorded broadcasts from 1941 to 1943, and these have since been collected and published (Pound Reference Pound and Doob1978). The poison in these broadcasts can hardly be conveyed by any excerpt, which inevitably dampens the rabid tone and the cumulative effect. But it is important to understand that to call these broadcasts fascist or anti-Semitic is not a case of making any complicated or subtle claim about cultural constructions. These broadcasts (to paraphrase and condense) make repeated, bloodthirsty calls to abandon the fight against Mussolini and Hitler and to destroy instead the ‘kikes’, kike-sympathisers, and usurers who have rotted Western civilisation and spread a filth worse than typhus.
When the Americans took Italy, Pound fled and spent some time in hiding before his arrest in May 1945. He was then returned to America for trial on a capital charge of treason: ‘this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure’ (wrote Cummings in public defence), ‘who had just arrived at our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech’, (Reference Cummings1967) 69). Many literary friends rallied to his cause, and instead of being convicted of treason, Pound was incarcerated on grounds of insanity.
Cummings’ poem might seem to date from around the time of Pound's arrest, if ‘come home to us now’ contains a reference to Pound's capture and return to America for trial. However, there are other dimensions to this line and it should not be pushed as evidence for the date of the poem. It is better to stick undogmatically with the general dating of sometime after January 1941. Even if the poem was written only shortly after that post quem, Cummings – and likewise any putative reader – would have had knowledge of Pound's fascist activities.Footnote 13
Cummings refers to Pound as ‘Our Ezra’, which is not standard American diction. To put ‘our’ in front of a proper name would be common enough in Ireland and in some areas of Britain, but it is not a feature of any American dialect. For the American Cummings, ‘Our Ezra’ is a marked phrase which raises the question, as opposed to what other Ezra or Ezras? Presumably the other Ezra is the Biblical Ezra; there are few other Ezras of much cultural prominence. (Cummings grew up in an ecclesiastical family: his father was a theologian and Unitarian minister.) The capitalisation of personal pronouns (‘Our’) which is used here also signals a biblical register. The biblical connection is anticipated in the ‘prophe / tic’ of the first and second lines, even if, to be exact, the biblical Ezra was a scribe and priest rather than a prophet.
In the biblical account, Ezra led a cohort of exiles back to Judaea by permission of King Artaxerxes of Persia, to join in the rebuilding of the Temple. When he arrived with his followers in Judaea, he was appalled to discover that the exiles who had returned somewhat earlier had begun to marry non-Jewish wives, endangering the purity of the returned community. Ezra, together with other Jewish leaders, set up an enquiry which determined who among the Jews had taken foreign wives; the enquiry forced them to repudiate those wives together with any children born of the marriage.
Neither Pound nor the biblical narrative comes out of the comparison well. Fascist Italy and twentieth-century ideas of racial purity make an uncomfortable lens through which to read the biblical story. At the same time, Cummings’ play on Pound's Jewish name ironically highlights Pound's anti-Semitism.Footnote 14 Most importantly, by evoking the biblical story, the poem establishes that ‘the adventure of Our Ezra’ involves politics, fascism and ideas about national purity. Without requiring any more explicit reference to Pound's political activities, the poem summons the force of the reader's knowledge. Pound's fascism is the backdrop to the poem's biting comment on Pound's poetic style.Footnote 15
The phonograph
By the 1940s, the phonograph or gramophone itself had potentially fascist connotations for the modernists, although these associations are not univalent. It has been argued, for example, that while Woolf in her novel Between the Acts associates the gramophone with fascist control of the mob and the drowning out of individual thought, she also manipulates the meaning of the gramophone in order to create a space for protest against fascism (Pridmore-Brown Reference Pridmore-Brown1998). Some modernist writers held an elitist prejudice against the gramophone on account of its association with the entertainment of the masses and its role in disseminating supposedly low culture.Footnote 16 This dissemination of recorded material could be understood as an attack on true artistic merit and authenticity. ‘For modernists, the primary weakness of the gramophone was that it was imitative’ (Knowles Reference Knowles2003, 5–6). In Cummings’ poem, these ideas of inferiority and imitation colour the image of Pound listening to the voice of Joyce.
The connotations of the phonograph for a modernist authorship and readership are important in dating Cummings’ poem to after Joyce's death in January of 1941. The phonograph was associated with death and with the preserved voices of the dead, as well as with the death or loss of the artistic soul in mere mechanical reproduction (Knowles Reference Knowles2003). Most crucially, the image used by the Victor Talking Machine Company would have been widely readable to an earlier audience as the image of a dog listening to the voice – not just of his master – but specifically of his dead master, drawing on the sentimental Victorian genre of the pet mourning his master at the graveside (Knowles (Reference Knowles2003) 7; Rice (Reference Rice and Kershner2003) 158–9). When Pound listens on the phonograph to the voice of Joyce, it should be understood as Joyce's posthumous voice. This reading is reinforced by the final two lines of the poem, in which the voice on the phonograph speaks. The voice evokes – or considering the modernist connotations of the phonograph, perhaps we should say ‘imitates’ – a folksong about death. The final line of the poem also evokes the final lines of Joyce's Ulysses, and so Cummings’ reader may make a further connection: Joyce himself, earlier in Ulysses, summoned the same image of the dog listening to the phonograph in an echo of the burial of Paddy Dignam.Footnote 17
‘our hero’
Ear to the phonograph, ‘our hero heard suddenly His Master's Voice’. The phrase has a sarcastic and diminishing force. There is something of the modernist anti-hero in the term, especially in context of the reference to Joyce. But where the modernist anti-hero is often an appealing character, this reference to Pound as ‘our hero’ does not show warmth. There is more warmth in Cummings’ frequent references, throughout his poetry and prose, to the ‘unhero’ or ‘nonhero’, than there is in the sarcastic ‘our hero’.
For Cummings, the sarcasm of ‘our hero’ connects directly to pride and the inflated ego. He uses the phrase of himself in a letter to his mother, dated 29 March 1941 (and thus from broadly the same time period as his Sapphic):
“You New Englanders” remarked Charlie Malamuth in Moscow,sagely wagging his handsome head “are strange folk.” We are. I began to realise it years ago, when my friend Gilbert Seldes accused me of what he called “the egocentric predicament”. If Gilbert had been a Catholic he'd have used another phrase–“the sin of pride.” For what he meant was that really,underneath everything,I considered myself pretty dam omniscient. –Well,our hero(being a New Englander)vigorously denied all. But very gradually I began to notice that if something happened which prevented me from doing as I pleased,then(by Jove)I tended to feel downright frustrated:nay,even personally insulted! Talk about “childish”! Maybe,some day,I'll be blessed with a touch of true humility. (Cummings (Reference Cummings, Dupee and Stade1972) 159)
Cummings wrote about Pound's stubborn pride in an entry in his personal journal:
But America did “win this war”:therefore,P(having bet a thousand percent on the completely wrong horse)is in trouble. And now he writes me(in effect) that everybody's mistaken except himself! (Quoted in Sawyer-Lauçanno (Reference Sawyer-Lauçanno2005) 465)
Cummings’ ‘our hero’ highlights Pound's insufferable arrogance.
‘(Yes)Joyce’
The poem's discussion of Pound's style is framed by the image of his doggish subservience to James Joyce. The final two lines of the poem offer the words which Pound hears as he cocks his ear to the phonograph:
These lines rework an early American folksong, ‘Father, Dear Father’ – an appropriate allusion, since the phonograph is after all a means for replaying music. Cummings himself had a life-long love of popular culture.Footnote 18 The folksong is sung in the persona of a child, begging a father who is out late after work (presumably drinking) to come home to Mother and to another child, brother Ben, who is ill in the first verse, who worsens in the second verse, and who dies in the third verse.
The first two lines of this verse recur in the song's following verses, repeated verbatim except that the clock strikes two and then three.
Cummings’ exploitation of this folksong brings mortality and father issues to the fore. In the song, the child calls a father home. In the poem, the relationship is inverted: when Joyce calls Pound home, there can be no doubt that the father-figure is Joyce. To underline the point, Cummings’ steeple-clock strikes – not one, two, or three – but ‘Joyce’, to whom Pound parenthetically answers ‘yes’, ‘Yes’, in allusion to the closing line of Joyce's Ulysses: ‘and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.’Footnote 20
This image of Pound, dominated by a father-complex for Joyce and by awareness of his own literary inferiority, is the final verdict expressed in Cummings’ poem. It is time now to see what lurks behind this cutting verdict. Section II turns to the other poems activated by Cummings: Swinburne's ‘Sapphics’ and Pound's own Sapphic ‘Apparuit’.
II. ‘carven in subtle stuff’
Swinburne's ‘Sapphics’
Cummings’ poem advertises its own form as ‘Sapphics quite dissimilar unto A.Swin / burne's’. A. C. Swinburne's Pre-Raphaelite ‘Sapphics’, from Poems and Ballads (1866), are beautiful and fluid. His poem talks of Sappho's choice in favour of music and lesbian love, defying ‘the white implacable Aphrodite’ and her heterosexual Loves. In his final two stanzas, Swinburne imagines that the ghosts of Sappho and her lesbian poet lovers can still be heard:
Swinburne's verse is metrically impeccable. The understanding of the Sapphic form here is the one which Swinburne, Pound and Cummings all share, viz. three lines of the form:
– ˘–×– ˘˘– ˘– –
and a final (Adonic) line of the form:
– ˘ ˘– –.Footnote 22
It is a difficult metre to achieve in English. The last syllables of each line present a particular challenge: the double stress of the spondee does not come easily in English in that final foot position. Rudyard Kipling's Sapphic poem ‘The Craftsman’, for example, takes the easier road and ends many lines (both main and Adonic) with the trochee. (We will return to Kipling's poem briefly later.) There is perfectly good precedent in English verse for taking the last syllable of the Adonic line as free –˘˘–×, but it seems to me that Swinburne aims for –˘˘– –, and it is his form that lies behind Pound and Cummings. The Sapphic metre is a challenging metre in English, and Swinburne rises to the challenge. Some of Swinburne's line-ends are particularly stylish: ‘unsándálled’, ‘revértéd’. Monotony at the line-end is avoided with an impressive array of one, two, three and four syllable words. In an eighty-line poem, there are only perhaps nine lines where it is hard to credit the full double stress at the line-end.Footnote 23
The discipline of Swinburne's metre is a large part of what makes his verse so compelling. Swinburne exploits the distance between the Sapphic rhythm and the natural rhythm of the English language and uses it to create a haunting voice. The rhythm of Swinburne's lines pulses without being in any way sing-song. A reader who did not know the Sapphic metre could learn it from this poem: the lines themselves lodge the metre in the reader's mind, and the metre builds and draws the reader in. Writing about beauty and music, Swinburne manages to write lines which are themselves beautiful and musical and which find the lyric potential of the Sapphic in English. The otherworldly quality of his own verse engages the reader in listening as if to the echoes of Sappho's music.
Pound's ‘Apparuit’
Pound's ‘Apparuit’, from Ripostes (1912), imports into English verse the Greek and Latin idea of syllable quantity. Ripostes represents the shift to Imagism which became a defining move in Pound's poetic trajectory. ‘Apparuit’ itself is closely connected to Pound's lifelong interest in ‘absolute rhythm’ – the idea that words possess inherent and absolute qualities of rhythm, emotion and music.Footnote 24 ‘Apparuit’ remains essential to understanding Pound's poetic trajectory, although he came to abandon its limiting attempt at classicising quantities in favour of a looser approach to rhythm (cf. Martin (Reference Martin2012) 182–3). It might be surprising that Cummings returned to this 1912 poem when, approximately three decades later, he was struggling with what Pound had become. Cummings could have taken aim at the more recent poetry, but perhaps that would have been too easy: ‘Pound may or may not be now “insane”–most certainly he isn't his was;nor has he become his was for years! & never did I feel the “cantos”(except for a line here and there)good …’.Footnote 25 The young Pound, on the other hand, had influenced Cummings very deeply, and Cummings shared Pound's interest in the musicality of words.Footnote 26 It was this early admiration for and literary debt to Pound which Cummings struggled to resolve in his conflicted efforts to distinguish between poet and propagandist.
Here is ‘Apparuit’ in full, scanned with markings for stress (e.g. Gólden) and markings for long and short syllables (Gōldĕn), combined so that both stress and quantity can be read (Gṓldĕn).
APPARUIT
se, ĭn thĕ pṓrtăl 
s
wrvĕl, crvĕn ĭn sbtlĕ stff, ă
fe diḗd dṓwn ĭn thĕ lmp ănd flckēred,ght ăt thĕ wṓndĕr.msŏn, frṓstȳ wīth dḗw, thĕ rṓsĕs bḗnd whḗre ăfr mṓvīng ĭn thĕ glmŏroūs snnkst ĭn lfe ŏf erth, ŏf thĕ ar, thĕ tssuēt theḗys, thĕ breth ŏf thĕ fiḗlds ĭs thne thḗre,nd, yĕt thĕ steḗl
gṓīngrkl hst tho dred ănd thĕ dredĕd aḗthĕrrtĕd bĕfṓre theḗ.ft ăt corāge tho ĭn thĕ shḗll ŏf gṓld, cst-k ŏf thĕ bṓd, cmēstght, thĕn shṓne thīne ṓrĭĕl ānd thĕ stnned lghtdĕd ăbot theḗ.lf thĕ grvĕn sholdĕr, thĕ throt ăflsh wīthnds ŏf lght ĭnwṓvĕn ăbot ĭt, lṓvelī- 18ll thngs, fral ắlăbstĕr, h mḗ! 19ft ĭn dĕprtīng, 20
lĭcắtel pḗrfḗct, 21nd! Thĕ clṓth ŏf thĕ mgĭcắl hnds! 22 ă slght thng, tho ĭn ắccḗss ŏf cnnīng 23r'dst tŏ ăssme ths? 24There is no external point of reference for the idea of syllable quantity in English, and Pound's approach to quantities is essentially intuitive (cf. Adams (Reference Adams1977)). Pound deals in syllable quantity and not simply in long or short vowels. The ear, for Pound, is the judge. Long syllables are created by agglomeration of consonants only when the consonants actually have the effect of slowing down the syllable, not simply by rule.Footnote 27 There are extant recordings of Pound reading some of his own poetry (though not of ‘Apparuit’ itself).Footnote 28 Pound's voice was low and resonant. The ‘r's are heavily rolled and slow down the speech. Pound read his poems in a voice assimilated to an Irish accent which he had adopted in London under the influence of W. B. Yeats (Witemeyer (Reference Witemeyer and Nadel1999) 45). Even more than Yeats, Pound read with an exaggerated variation in syllable length which suggests the influence of Italian language patterns, and this sonorous lingering over long syllables contextualises his idea of quantity in English.
In the scansion of ‘Apparuit’, the phrase ‘with dew’ (l. 5) clearly constitutes the most significant metrical defect and was remarked upon unfavourably at the time.Footnote 29 Apart from the problems in line 5, assessment of Pound's metrical accomplishment is essentially a matter of personal opinion.Footnote 30 To my ear, the greatest weakness of Pound's scansion lies in his treatment of the sound ‘ee’. Pound relies heavily (eleven times) on ‘ee’ for the creation of long quantities, but in a short position he puts the last syllables of ‘steely’ (l. 10), ‘darkly’ (l. 11), ‘body’ (l. 14), and ‘delicately’ (l. 21).Footnote 31 The lack of stress does not seem to me to shorten the quantity – that is to say, it does not genuinely take less time to pronounce the ‘ee’ of these syllables than to pronounce the ‘ee’ elsewhere. This inconsistent treatment of ‘ee’ interferes with the reader's attempt to internalise the quantitative project. There are various other minor points; as Adams observes, the first syllables of ‘subtle’ (l. 2) and ‘cunning’ (l. 23) are points where ‘stress alone makes a short syllable long’ (Reference Adams1977, 105; 1988, 60).
The metre has strengths. At certain points a discrepancy between accent and quantity creates tensions in the verse (Adams (Reference Adams1977) 104; (Reference Adams1988) 58). Pound's use of syllables slowed through agglomeration of consonants shows considerable control. Heavy following consonants affect the scansion of: ‘lamp’ (l. 3); the first syllables of ‘crimson’ and ‘frosty’; ‘with’, ‘bend’ (l. 5); the first syllable of ‘tissue’ (l. 7); ‘land’ (l. 10); ‘hast’ (l. 11); ‘swift’, ‘shell’, ‘cast-’ (l. 13); the second syllable of ‘camest’ (l. 14); ‘with’ (l. 17); ‘strands’ (l. 18); (loveli-)‘est’ (l. 19); ‘weft’, both syllables of ‘perfect’ (l. 21); ‘wind’, ‘cloth’ and ‘hands’ (l. 22). These twenty-one examples are not evenly distributed within the poem. Thirteen of the twenty-one fall within four individual lines, and two of those lines are adjacent (ll. 5, 13, 21–2). Pound appreciates that an agglomeration of consonants is more effective in slowing syllable pronunciation when these syllables are clustered together, within lines which are not dominated by long vowels.
There is brilliance in Pound's handling of the idea of quantity in English, but on the whole, it is an unappealing performance. Cummings indicates, in his oblique fashion, that ‘Apparuit’ is not a very likeable poem, and many readers now would surely be tempted to agree. Pound's choice of register feels as if it serves primarily to open up forms which are useful for their long quantities: longer verb forms (‘drinkst’, ‘dar'dst’) and archaic second-person pronouns and possessives (‘thee’, ‘thou’, ‘thine’).Footnote 32 The language throughout the poem (‘steely’, ‘darkly hast thou dared’, ‘dreaded aether’) serves metrical convenience and is overcooked. Where Swinburne uses metre to draw the reader in, Ezra Pound holds his reader at arms-length. The metre is a show and the reader's role is to admire. Indeed, Pound was capable of considerable self-indulgence as a poet, and especially when it came to his metrical accomplishments. Concerning his own ‘Salve O Pontifex!’ from A Lume Spento (1908) – a tribute to Swinburne, as it happens – Pound said later, when he chose to reprint it: ‘Balderdash, but let it stand for the rhythm.’Footnote 33
The Sapphic form and exploration of the poetic endeavour
The Sapphic in English has emerged as a form particularly suitable for reflecting on the poetic endeavour itself.Footnote 34 Such reflection can be offered with a light touch, as in Kipling's ‘The Craftsman’ (mentioned above), which opens with Shakespeare in the pub reminiscing about the Cleopatra he had known:
THE CRAFTSMAN
The poem continues similarly through Juliet, Lady Macbeth and Ophelia, as Shakespeare talks until sunrise.
Where Kipling's exploration of poetic creativity adopts a self-deprecating tone, Swinburne's is in a more consciously elevated register. Swinburne offers a version of Aphrodite's encounter with Sappho, positioned in a close dialogue with the themes and imagery of Sappho's own ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’.Footnote 36 Swinburne's ‘Sapphics’ conjure the immortality of Sappho's poetry with the vision of her pale forehead, around which ‘Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever. / Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite / Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song’ (ll. 36–8). Swinburne finds the origin of Sappho's exquisite verse in the Lesbians’ rejection of Aphrodite and heterosexual love. From the kisses of the Lesbians, ‘Mouth to mouth and hand upon hand’ (l. 51), emerges music (ll. 57–60):
Swinburne's poem ends with the imprint of the Lesbians on the now empty and haunted land: ‘All withdrew long since, and the land was barren / Full of fruitless women and music only’ (ll. 69–70). But the lingering, haunting regret of the last few stanzas does not undercut Swinburne's celebration of Sappho's poetry. Rather the opposite: the pathos at the end of the poem heightens the stirring, unsurpassable, lingering nature of Sappho's music.
Cummings himself explored very similar themes in an early Sapphic poem, dating from his undergraduate years at Harvard. Like Swinburne, Cummings explores lingering and transience, earthly life and poetic glory, and sunset.
SAPPHICS
The youthful Cummings, having published these ‘Sapphics’ in The Harvard Monthly, left this poem by the wayside; it was never included in any of his collections. These stanzas lack the majesty of Swinburne's ‘Sapphics’, whose influence they show to the point of lacking real originality. Cummings has learned directly from Swinburne how to end a Sapphic line. Apart from ‘poems’ (l. 3), the line endings are either borrowed verbatim (‘heaven’, ‘sunset’) or else closely follow Swinburne's language patterns. But while Cummings’ early ‘Sapphics’ are not a masterpiece, they demonstrate his control of Sapphic metre.Footnote 38 When Cummings again turned his hand to Sapphic verse for ‘the phonograph may(if it likes)be prophe’, he adopted a broken and disjunctive metre. This is not because the form was beyond him; his broken form and metre are themselves part of his comment on Pound.
Pound's ‘Apparuit’ builds on the use of the Sapphic form in English as a form suitable for exploring the nature of poetry itself, but Pound takes this in a different direction from his predecessors. Unlike Kipling, Swinburne or Cummings in his Harvard-era ‘Sapphics’, Pound does not take poetry directly as his subject matter. But his poem is still about the nature of the poetic endeavour, perhaps more than it is about its ostensible subject matter, which is swamped by the poem's involvement in its own language. ‘Apparuit’ is driven by its exploration of the nature of metre in English and its attempt to put English metre onto a new footing. The final section of this paper looks specifically at Cummings’ response to Pound on matters of form and metre, and at the attitudes to Classical verse and English poetry which the positions of Pound and Cummings variously imply.
Cummings on Pound
Cumming's broken, modernist Sapphic is itself an exploration of the nature of metre in English as well as a comment upon Pound. Pound's ‘Apparuit’ introduces quantitative metre into English with the idea of creating a richer, supposedly superior English poem. Pound saw himself as working with quantities natural to English, and of course it is perfectly true that the English ear hears long and short vowels and that a native speaker will be sensitive to the time taken to pronounce a word or a syllable. But what Pound most succeeds in doing with ‘Apparuit’ is making an English poem sound not very much like it was written in English.Footnote 39 Cummings punctures such nonsense. If a poem is going to be written in English, then it is the weight of the English language and the English poetic tradition that counts most.
Here is Cummings’ poem again, with scansion (mine, not Cummings’) marked. Scansion here marks stress; Cummings is certainly not taking the quantitative approach which he implicitly criticises in Pound's work.
In the first two stanzas, lines 2–4 and 6–8 scan in perfectly correct Sapphic metre, but lines 1 and 5 do not scan exactly to the Sapphic pattern. In both lines, the first foot is reversed, opening with an iamb (˘–) instead of the Sapphic trochee (–˘); in line 1, this has a knock-on effect also for the second foot. The first metrical assertion of the poem (‘the phónográph’) is, therefore, an assertion of the primacy of the iambic rhythm – the rhythm which is most natural to the English language. By breaking the Sapphic form in the first two feet of line 1 and in the first foot of line 5, Cummings is also exercising the English first-foot licence. By signalling his relationship to iambic rhythm and by taking this first-foot licence, Cummings taps into aspects of English poetry which are central to the English verse tradition and quite independent of the Classical tradition and Classical metre.
Kipling, Swinburne, Pound and Cummings in his early ‘Sapphics’ all eschew rhyme, but in these later Sapphic verses, Cummings uses rhyme as another way of asserting the primacy of the English ear. The Sapphic form seems to give way as rhyme takes over. In the first stanza, although lines 2 and 3 rhyme, the stanza could not really be said to be on a rhyme scheme. Rhyme begins to assert itself in the second stanza, which uses half-rhyme on an ‘a a b b’ scheme. But the impact of the rhyme is softened, firstly because it is only half-rhyme, and secondly because the effect is obscured by the mid-word enjambment of lines 5 to 6 and 6 to 7. However, by the third stanza, the Sapphic has lost significant ground. Here a full line is substituted for the final Adonic line, generating a quatrain on a strong ‘a b a b’ rhyme scheme. Most of lines 1–8 are enjambed mid-phrase or even mid-word, but none of lines 9–12 are enjambed, which further tips the scales in favour of the rhyme over the broken Sapphic form.
In lines 2–4 and 6–8, it is unlikely to be immediately obvious to a reader how correct Cummings’ Sapphic metre is. Most readers will have to get out the pencil and mark the stresses before the accurate Sapphic metre is apparent. While Swinburne seduces his reader into feeling the Sapphic metre in spite of its unfamiliarity, the disjunctive language of Cummings makes it very hard to feel any rhythm. This absence of pulsing rhythm does not come from any lack of metrical artistry. Some of Cummings’ scansion is very clever, and ‘Víctor Victrólá’ could hardly be bettered for witty Adonic rhythm. And yet, Cummings’ abrasive, broken language actively disguises the correctness of his metre, as if to deny that the pulse of Sapphic metre can be instinctively felt in English. The lines in which a rhythm does pulse are lines 10–11. The metre of these lines has come under the influence of the folksong, ‘Father, Dear Father’, which Cummings reworks in lines 11–12. With the four-beat pulse of ‘Please Fáther – dear Fáther – come hóme with me nów’, imitated in lines 10 and 11, Cummings shows how much more easily the English ear falls into rhythms that are native.
Cummings’ assertion of the primacy of English within the context of English poetry is not a broad-brush rejection of non-native forms, as his attitude to Swinburne demonstrates. This non-native quality of the Sapphic rhythm is precisely what Swinburne exploits in order to evoke a scene which is foreign and otherworldly. The unfamiliar metre of Sapphic stanzas naturally creates distance for the English reader, and Swinburne turns that sense of distance into a yearning for Sappho's music. Cummings’ respect for Swinburne underlines the point that his disdain for the pretentious use of Classical metre constitutes a comment falling specifically on Pound.
Cummings describes Pound as a ‘delver in mines strictly aes / thetic(short aes long as it happens by ex / ception)subjects’. Cummings’ reference to syllables ‘long by exception’ sounds like something out of a schoolboy Latin or Greek grammar.Footnote 40 It hints that Pound's experiment in quantitative metre is essentially adolescent – a point which is reinforced by the suggestion that Pound could not outgrow a father-complex for Joyce, who had pushed the English literary tradition (and, with Ulysses, its relationship to Classical models) to a level which Pound could never match. Cummings neatly lampoons Pound's Latinity. The line breaks after ‘aes’ and ‘ex’ create two Latin words, and ‘aes’ (“copper”) puns wittily on the image of Pound as a ‘delver in mines’. The Latin is clever, but it is also an artifice: the Latin words are artificially created by breaking up English words, and this manufacturing of words highlights the artificiality of Pound's own endeavour. For all Pound's pronouncements about uncovering innate rhythm, a verse based on quantitative metre is simply not natural to English.
In Cummings’ poem, Pound's own voice is marginalised and paranthesised. In the second stanza, within the parenthesis, Pound's voice is invoked: ‘(short aes long as it happens by ex / ception)’. This phrase does not present Pound himself as speaking, but it does seem to summon Pound on metre, and to satirise him. We do not hear Pound speaking directly until the third stanza, where Pound is deprived of his own highly aesthetised and contrived voice to the point where his first vocal contibution is not even human – ‘(bowwow)’. His second contribution, ‘(yes)’, ‘(Yes)’, aligns him with the voice of Molly Bloom at the close of Ulysses and might be read as feminised. By marginalising Pound in this manner, Cummings seems also to suggest that Pound's pretentiousness renders his poetic voice ineffectual.
By holding his reader at arm's length, Pound's unlikeable ‘Apparuit’ takes pleasure in the exclusionary aspects of Classical literature. Pound's disdainful attitude to the reader associates him with highly problematic attitudes to the Classics. His belief that he could harness the Classical tradition and use it to elevate English verse into a superior metrical form taps into the assumption that there is an inherent superiority to Classical literature and to the sort of people who appreciate it.Footnote 41 Cummings’ demolition of ‘Apparuit’ is brilliant and perfectly on target. Cummings’ ‘long by exception’ captures Pound's pretentiousness and adolescence. His reference to Pound as ‘our hero’ hints at the arrogance. He captures the artificiality of Pound's quantitative endeavour, and he implies that Pound's artificiality makes his poetic voice ineffectual. Cummings’ own use of metre and form rejects Pound's literary snobbery and asserts the right of English verse to take ownership of the Classical tradition and to mould it to the English ear. Cummings’ own immensely likeable relationship to the Classical tradition is dynamic and energising, and it asserts above all the rights of quality over snobbery.
