Late Pound: The Case of Canto CVII

With Canto CVII we approach the end of Pound's epic journey. In the Thrones sequence alone we have already travelled far, the poet conducting us from the eighth-century history of the Lombards in Italy, through Byzantium and China, and on finally to three Cantos (CVII-CIX) quarried from the Institutes of the great English jurist, Edward Coke. Few readers have warmed to the unrelenting opacity of these last three Cantos, however, and committed apologists aside, few have felt ready to adopt the prone position Pound's didacticism here seems to expect. As a result, little has been written about these Cantos that is not primarily exegetical. (1) The present essay attempts, then, a close reading of Canto CVII, not principally to provide explication but rather to scrutinise the modalities of Pound's thinking at this late point in his long poem. In Thrones, Coke is a pivotal figure who stands at the interface between feudal and commercial periods, and who represents a moment in which, as Steve Shepherd, Coke's latest editor, explains, "kings sought ever more control over the affairs of state and of individuals but in which individuals had both new ideas about their own opportunities and new money with which to pursue them." (2) Coke is an obvious hero for Pound since he seems to share with the author of The Cantos a deep attachment to tradition and precedent while at the same time promoting a conception of law that was "in every sense revolutionary," striking a "new balance between monarch and subject." (3) Shepherd also sees him as responsible for notions of a legally limited monarch and of common subjects who held rights, which were, thanks to Coke, now deemed to have existed since Magna Carta, and the idea of a legal machinery independent of all but the authority of the nation's legislature are nearly inextricable from the other causes of the English Civil War, of the American Revolution, and of the American Civil War. (4) Coke, then, is hardly an eccentric point of reference for Pound in these last Cantos where questions of justice and representation are of primary importance--questions that had recently had a particular urgency for Pound himself with his extradition from Italy to the United States. Indeed, he would later preface his collection of essays called Impact with "Of Misprision of Treason," a passage culled from the third volume of Coke's Institutes. (5) This level of personal involvement with his new legal materials may explain some of the obliquity of these Cantos where syntactical connectedness is often drastically reduced in order to hint at other forms of connection which may not be expressed directly. We may find a first taste of this in the opening lines of Canto CVII: The azalea is grown while we sleep In Selinunt', In Akragas Coke. Inst. 2.. to all cathedral churches to be read 4 times in the yeare 20.H. 3 that is certainty mother and nurse of repose he that holdeth by castle-guard pays no scutage (Pound, Cantos, 77) Selinunt' is from the Italian Selinunte, which in turn derives from the Greek name of a colony in Sicily, while Akragas is the city now called Agrigento. Note how the lack of punctuation invites us to understand the reference to Coke as somehow appositional to these Sicilian items, and this indeed is what a number of Pound's critics have done, discerning a connection in terms of subsequent references to King Frederick II, an enlightened ruler and lawmaker and also patron of the Sicilian School of Poetry (the Companion to The Cantos, for example, remarks without any real corroboration from the text that "Some of the precepts of the Magna Carta were maturing in Sicily under [Frederick's] direction."). (6) Later in the Canto, Pound himself hints obliquely at some such connection by quoting what is often considered to be the earliest Italian poem, "Rosa fresca aulentissima" by Ciulio d'Alcamo which Rossetti, Pound's source for this, translates as "Thou sweetly-smelling fresh red rose/That near thy summer art,",7 This approaching summer heralds the climactic act which is the signing into law of Magna Carta in June 1215 ("the French could not do it/they had not Magna Charta/in ver l'estate," (8) It is this document upon which Coke comments in his The Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England that will constitute the principal source for Canto CVII, The text of the Institutes used by Pound appears to be an edition of 1797, a section of which was offset in 1974 for the Square Dollar series by Omni Press and titled Edward Coke on Magna Charta, (9) Currently based in Palmdale, California and trading under the name of the Omni Christian Bookclub, this publisher is described by one online political commentator as "a leading purveyor of radical traditionalist Catholic materials, including a cornucopia of rabidly anti-Semitic and conspiratorial writings," (10) Pound's Coke, then, has some difficult company to keep: Omni is at present advertising Richard Harwood's Did Six Million Really Die? …