Hell Cantos

Hell is a loaded word. Its loaded in religion, where the concept is used to
promote the idea of damnation and a fear of divinities; but its also loaded in the
literary world, where hells abound. Of all the literary hells that might have
interested Pound, the one that is most apparent here is the late medieval poet
Dante Alighieris, from The Divine Comedy: after all, Pound begins his hell-cantos
with a line straight from Dantes Inferno:
Io venni in luogo dogni luce muto
The line, taken from Book V of Dantes Inferno, translates as, I came to a place
mute of all light, according to Terrell, and as Robert Anton Wilson reminds us,
light for Pound is the divine, the Paradiscal. (And darkness is ignorance,
hellish in its awful power.) Of course, if you know Dantes work, then you know
who Dante put in hell: not just Biblical or classical figures, but also
contemporaries of his, especially those from among his political opponents in
Florence. Dante was a Guelph paerticularly, a White Guelph, which meant
that his faction favored the Pope over the Holy Roman Emperor, but that they
also wanted more freedom from Rome.
This is significant in a few ways. First, Pound readily admitted (for example, in
letters to Wyndham Lewis and John Drummond) that the hell in these Cantos is
an English, Londonian hell. (See Terrell, page 65, for details.) Pound does consign
the off American figure to this hell, mid you Woodrow Wilson, near the
beginning, is one example but it is, overall, an English inferno. His bitterness
and dismay may have actually turned his decision to leave, after burning too
many bridges, into what felt for him like an exile comparable to Dantes.
Second, Pounds hell cantos are quite directly political, though in the economic
sense. He was already under the sway of Douglas and Social Credit to some
degree by Canto XII, but here, he behaves like Dante, consigning particular
figures of the time. Prime Minister Lloyd George and Woodrow Wilson, he blames
for the war that still stands clearly in his mind as a modern horror, an evil
committed against men for as he understands it economic reasons; he
consigns these leaders to a layer of hell where, amid the stench of wet coal
they stand with
their wrists bound to
their ankles
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, maggots
Pound goes farther than any English poet up to his day that I can think of in his
scatology, in the display of sexual organs, and he even ventures into the realm of
sodomitic imagery. But say what you will about arse-holes, there is not much
pubic hair in English literature, and none too many penises. (At least not till it
became the trend to put sex organs in poems, and a badge of biopollitics or
whatever; prior to that explosion in the poetry world, Geoffrey Chaucer stands
out in my mind as a big exception, with the mention of a womans pubic hair in
The Canterbury Tales, in the line, A beard!)
An illustration of Chaucers The Millers Tale from The Canterbury Tales. One of
the few major works of English literature to include not only farts and anuses, but
also pubic hair especially female pubic hair.

Pound goes on, excoriating others one with a scrupulously clean tablenapkin / tucked under his penis and another [w]ho disliked colloquial language
standing together oin the same position, collars circumscribing their legs.
Pounds political and ideological enemies are, in effect, reduced literally to
assholes farting into the wind. And gathered there are profiteers and financiers,
drinking blood sweetened with sh-t and lashing them with steel wires.
Also in hell are the betrayers of language liars, impersonators, sloppy or
careless users of words, and those who betray words and ideas knowingly and
maliciously. This is a place in hell that is ironic for Pound to discuss, given his own
later abuse of language and words. Among the sins of those in this place are
putting money lust above the pleasure of the senses, whom Pound decries as
perverts. I would tend to agree with Terrell in reading the lines about those who
plunge jewels into mud and howl to find them unstained being about those
whose relationship with art be it poetry, sculpture, music, or paintings is
inherently perverse.
Pound also consigns agents provocateurs to his hell their hands where feet
should go, and feet where hands should, their asses high in the air as the others
above and names a few Irish nationalists who were murdered by them
Patrick Henry Pease and Thomas M. McDonagh and in the same passage (and
position in his hell) Pound also attacks Gaius Verres an administrator was was
corrupt even by Roman standards and two religious figures whom he hated
John Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria. (He essentially hated the two for their
opposition to the mystery tradition within Christianity, which Pound found to be
one of the few redeeming features in Christianity and, building on Surettes
arguments, which he probably linked to the secret history of occult knowledge
going back to the ancient Greeks. (Likely Pound imagined this strand of mystic
knowledge to have survived in some form within the Church, until it was
bludgeoned to death by its clerical, moralist, Pauline opponents.) Of them, he
writes:
black beetles, burrowing into the sh-t,
The soil a decriptude, the ooze full of morsels,
lost contours, erosions.
This is as castigatory as we have seen Pound, and hes only just gotten started.
The next images echo the kind of Medieval horror-imagery of hell probably most
familiar to us in the work of the fifteenth-century painter Hieronymous Bosch,
just as much as the body-deconstruction above does:
Above the hell-rot
the great arse-hole,
broken with piles,
hanging stalactites,
greasy as sky over Westminster,
the invisible, many English,
the place lacking in interest,
last squalor, utter decrepitude,
the vice-crusaders, fahrting through silk,
waving the Christian symbols,
. . . . . . . . frigging a tin penny whistle,
Flies carrying news, harpies dripping with sh-t through the air,
May William Gibson forgive me, but: The sky was the color of an asshole, struck
by a hemorrhoid sickness. But what this hemorrhoid-stricken asshole
represents, of course, is a little less straightforward; well, this is Ezra Pound, after
all.
The slough of unamiable liars,

bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,
the soil living pus, full of vermin,
dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority,
pets-de-loup, sitting on piles of stone books,
obscuring the texts with philology,
hiding them under their persons,
the air without refuge of silence,
the drift of lice, teething,
and above it the mouthing of orators,
the arse-belching of preachers.
And Invidia,
the corruptio, foetor, fungus,
liquid animals, melted ossifications,
slow rot, foetic combustion,
chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy,
. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,
monopolists, obstructors of knowledge,
obstructors of distribution.
There are a great many sins listed here attributed to everyone from slum
owners and preachers to pets-de-loup (wolf farts, apparently a French idiom for
scholars) and pandars to authority. The images, too, are among the most
powerful in the poem: the drift of lice, teething and then we glimpse Envy
(Invidia) in the middle of a physical horror smorgasbord:
And Invidia,
the corruptio, foetor, fungus,
liquid animals, melted ossifications,
slow rot, foetic combustion,
chewed cigar-butts, without dignity, without tragedy,
. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles,
With obstructors of knowledge, / obstructors of distribution it is suddenly clear
that here in hell, it all comes down to usura, for Pound; but of course, one should
never assume that because Pound has pulled up a Medieval Latin word, that he
means what the word originally meant. J.J. Wilhelm puts it fairly succinctly in Ezra
Pound in London and Paris (pg 219):
Pound employed the medieval word usura to describe the excessive profits taken
from wrongful moneylending (but never condemning lending at a just rate of
interest, which is necessary for capitalistic development).
As Daniel Albright puts it in his section of The Cambridge Companion to Ezra
Pound, Hell is, to some degree, a bad bank (pg. 78). Well, Ive read enough
about Pounds economic ideas to date that I feel comfortable taking a stab at
explaining them, but would like to attempt it in a post of its own. Therefore, for
the moment, I think Ill simply note that for Pound, governments and banks
colluded in the way money was created, and Pond felt this system was
dangerous for everyone else in the world which seems quite apparent today, in
the ongoing economic crisis, though Pounds proposed solution seems as Leon
Surette points out to have had in common with the occult that interested
Pound so deeply, a thread of oversimplification and impatience with empirical
testing and confirmation.
Still, the primal, visceral horror of this hell is surprising, and powerful; Pounds
revulsion makes it clear that his economic concerns were not merely vague
theoretical interests, but were (for him) deeply connected to the world, and to

whatever ethics he held as crucial for the continuance of life in the world. And
yet, this primal, swirling chaos also reminds one a little of the primal, swirling
chaos in certain creation myths, for example in the first section of Ovids
Metamorphoses: and this makes sense too, if one will see ones way to fiding a
little optimism in Pound. He may have felt the world had already come apart at
the seams but that kind of collapse and destitution was also a part of the
recurrent cycle described in earlier Cantos. For that reason, it should not surprise
us that Pound took to the present-day now, only after some sixty pages of
pseudo-historical content: he was illustrating a thesis of a historical pattern, and
for what other reasons would he start out doing that, than to talk about the
present, and the immediate future that he wanted to build? This is the question
foremost in our minds, as we reach the end of Canto XIV.
Ah, but Pound is not finished with his exploration of Hell. Canto XV continues
through the infernal landscape:
The saccharescent, lying in glucose,
the pompous in cotton wool
with a stench like the fats at Grasse,
The French city of Grasse was, as those who have read Patrick Sskinds
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer will remember, a major site of European
perfume production in the old days: but, ironically, it stank to high heaven, a
horror in itself. There is something horrifying about the sweetness, the glucose
and cotton wool in the opening lines, combined with that horrendous stench at
the site where gorgeous perfumes were made. Like sausage and law, for Pound
seeing money being made was sickening.
the great scabrous arse-hole, sh-tting flies,
rumbling with imperialism,
ultimate urinal, middan, pisswallow without a cloaca,
. . . . . . r less rowdy, . . . . . . episcopus
. . . . . . . . sis,
head down, screwed into the swill,
his legs waving and pustular,
a clerical jock strap hanging back over the navel
his condom full of black beetles,
tattoo marks round the anus,
and a circle of lady golfers about him.
the courageous violent
slashing themselves with knives,
the cowardly inciters to violence
. . . . . n and. . . . . . . .h eaten by weevils,
. . . . . . ll like a swollen foetus,
There is a lot going on here: hateful insectile imagery, and scatology mobilized in
the service of moral commentary. Pounds image of a the great scabrous arsehole, sh-tting flies, / rumbling with imperialism, / ultimate urinal, middan,
pisswallow without a cloaca seems to be a characterization of London itself, and
his horror at its corruption. Daniel Albright, again: The excrementiousness of
money, a thesis dear to Freud, has rarely been presented so vividly as in Pounds
Cantos (again, page 78, and not for the last time in this post).
Here, finally, we meet USURA, the beast with a hundred legs amid those
respecters, / bowing to the lords of the place and the laudatores temporis
acti / claiming that the sh-t used to be blacker and richer; to Pounds cast of
villains are added the depraved Fabians aha, another NEATO SF CONNECTION,
as H.G. Wells was a prominent Fabian. The Fabians were a progressive

movement, tied up with socialist economics (though of a gradualist sort, rather

than a revolutionary Marxism) and free love and other things. But there are also
conservatives in this region of hell, chatting, / distinguished by gaiters of
slum-flesh, and then:
and the back-scratchers in a great circle,
complaining of insufficient attention,
the search without end, counterclaim for the missing scratch
the litigious,
a green bile-sweat, the news owners, . . . . s
the anonymous
. . . . . . . . ffe, broken
his head shot like a cannon-ball toward the glass gate,
peering through it an instant,
falling back to the trunk, epileptic
et nulla fidentia inter eos,
and no trust among them. the teeming rabble of England, the meddlers
and the profiteers of misery and the rest
all with their twitching backs,
with daggers, and bottle ends, waiting an
unguarded moment;
Urban man is a backstabber, after all but for Pound, this is enshrined in
economics, it is part of the system. For, after all, the hell here is a systemic hell,
and once again as Daniel Albright observes, for Pound hell is as much an
enormous printing press as it is anything else, and just as Martin Luther once did,
Pound conflates feces with ink both doing their part to foul and corrupt the
world, boredom out of boredom, in the form of British weeklies. Pound is,
perhaps, thinking of Leopold Bloom in Joyces Ulysses wiping his ass with a
British newspaper he certainly seems to hold them in the same esteem as
Bloom (and, apparently, Joyce). Pound was not alone in this disgust with
newspapers see Matthew Kibbles article The Betrayers of Language:
Modernism and the Daily Mail for a discussion that goes beyond Pound.
Plotinus.
Pound turns to his guide, the figure analogous to Virgil in Dantes Commedia;
according to Terrell, this figure is Plotinus, the Neoplatonist light philosopher
(who is actually mentioned later on in the Canto). The guide tells him of the
breeding of the tumorous, stinking periodicals of Britain, in metaphors of
tumours, pus flakes, scabs of a lasting pox.
The horror of the scene returns to the transfigured sky:
skin-flakes, repetitions, erosions,
endless rain from the arse-hairs,
as the earth moves, the centre
passes over all parts in succession,
a continual bum-belch
distributing its productions.
As R.A. Wilson suggests (in his commentary on Canto XV), if we compare this to
the radiant beauty of several earlier Cantos, the contrast is stark, powerful,
and affecting even if you do pause and say, But its all scatology! This is the
moment when the horror proves too much, and Pounds narrator voice cries out,
Andiamo! in a line all its own: the Korean ! or the late-20th and early21st century American, Lets get the fuck outta here!
There is a struggle, the mud gripping at feet, the run stifled by the hell itself, but
Plotinus provides the key: light is the key, reflected from Perseus shield, and the
Pound figure angles it such as to petrify the mud, the buried usurers, the

landscape of this hell just enough to provide a solid road a road like that built
by the Romans that leads out. Here, the poems shape on the page shifts:
shorter lines, and split almost as if into pairs, as Pound and Plotinus flee the
horrors, amid serpents tongues and growing evils.
The follows oblivion, and then some sort of waking, into a dream where Plotinus
is gone and talk of Naishapur the birthplace of Omar Khayyam or Babylon is
mentioned, and Pound comes to at the gates of hell the shield of Minerva,
borne by Perseus, tied to his back, he stumbles toward the gate, towards the sun
the Greek here means the sun in Homeric Greek and then,
Swollen-eyed, rested,
lids sinking, darkness unconscious.
Pound has reached the hellmouth stop it, you Buffy fans, this is a Dantean
hellmouth, but okay, yes, another SF CONNECTION I suppose (see below) and
is ready to leave, leaving, on his way out, the cleverness of Plotinus and the luck
of Minervas shield of knowledge, of understanding, but a knowledge and
understanding that goes back before Christianity, to the Hellenic myths and
legends, as well as to Neoplatonist philosophy of Plotinus that postdates
Christianity, but reaches back before it; and of course, it is the occult veneration
of light (which, in the end, can be imagined to be as ancient as human worship
itself) that saves him in the end.
And here it is: the gnostic theme we have been awaiting, the shield of Minerva,
borne by Perseus against the Medusa. Its interesting, though, in that the power
of something destructive Medusas horrific visage is used to wipe out the
oppressive horror of the Dantean hell. That which destroys can, with cleverness,
be used instead to save; Pound could be metaphorizing the kind of economics he
hopes will be adopted by the world but amid all the sodomitical references, its
difficult to isolate the economic from the sexual and the sexual, for Pound, is
always esoteric or occult! Therefore, its important to think about how the
esoteric or occult sexuality of this poem connects to the concept of usura, as
Pound understood it. For Pound (as for the medieval world) usura and sodomy
were similar in unnaturalness in being supposedly contra natura, because
they did not give rise to natural increase. (Hence also the condoms being
waved about in both Cantos filled with black beetles, the foul result of a
repression of nature being verminous and horrifying.)
Light here is somehow a power different from the necromantic magical power
represented in the earliest Cantos, though like necromantic power it can be
destructive or empowering. It is different because it mediates our relationship
with the world differently; it mediates between us and what is, rather than what
us and what was, or what was said to be. In the image of Pound holding
Minervas shield just so, angled toward the ground in order to escape from hell,
we see a strange admixture of this light/truth metaphor and the necromantic,
however, for after all, for Pound the necromantic is also on some level the
necroverbal the resurrection of the dead happens when ink intermediates.
When ink is corrupted, so is everything that proceeds from the verbal
including the fine details of the necromantic. Yet it is only through the necromatic
that we can find a route through the present, fallen state of the world, the hell
that the world becomes in a corrupted system poetical, economical, social: the
three are impossible to disentangle anyway.
And, back to that SF CONNECTION above: as for the idea of hells, hellmouths,
and the monstrosities sewed from them, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer: my
Korean tutor of a few years ago was a diehard Buffy fan. When I asked her what
attracted her to Buffy, she told me it was because the series encapsulated for
her everything that was hellish about high school. She was a Korean woman,
from Seoul, but had spent her high school years in Busan, and had undergone

various kinds of maltreatment and ostracization due to her origins as a Seoulite.

(Her accent was mocked, she was excluded, and people commented about her
being a big city girl.) For her, Buffys hellmouth-haunted school embodied the
hellishness of regionalist bigotry among her fellow teens years before. For me,
Buffys hellmouth-haunted high school represents other hellish aspects from my
youth the violence that exploded into my life when we moved from Nova
Scotia to northern Saskatchewan, among other things.
Welcome to the Hellmouth not the first reference you expected today, was it?
Which is to say, hell is a versatile concept: it can metaphorize just about
anything one likes, as long as one is sufficiently anti-conformist and sufficiently
unhappy with the system in which one lives. And that, it seems to me, is the
interesting thing about these Cantos: theyre not simply a pair of hell-Cantos.
Instead, they depict a system, one in which occult truth is concealed in a way like
many other truths; in which the lies of bankers and the lies of clergymen
intersect, forming a mutual continuity, and forming a system hostile to meaning,
purpose, and artistry in the world, but also economic freedom and health, the
stability of civilization, and the decency of humanity. All of the scatology may
simply demonstrate Pounds rage, but it also bespeaks a kind of ruination that is
either ongoing, or seems to Pound at the time to loom in the immediate future.
Pound may well smell another war, another great conflict, or maybe he is only
looking back to The Great War, and its horrors which he will discuss further in
Canto XVI. Nearly nobody today is willing to hear out, much less seriously
consider, the solution Pound suggested for the problems of the European world in
his time (ie. Social Credit theory). But the thing to note here is a strange, shining
sense of optimism running through the poems. Optimism, even in the jaws of
hell well, for a certain value of hell, and a certain value of optimism as well. But
the definition of hell as Pound sees it is impossible to pinpoint without definitions
of purgatory and paradise. But those who have glimpsed at the Drafts and
Fragments in the back of The Cantos know the lines that cannot but come to
mind, when asking what Pound thought paradise was:
I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.
Let the Gods forgive what I
have made
Let those I love try to forgive
what I have made.
The project is doomed, we know or should know. But we will bear witness to
this failure, over the coming year: we will see how things fall apart, how paradise
refuses to be written.
Purgatory, thats another matter, and for that, we can turn to Canto XVI, as we
shall next week.
Now, as for how to works out in terms of what is useful for the fiction I want to
write about Pound well:
By 1924 or 1925, Pound is quite convinced that Douglas Social Credit theories
hold water, and are useful and important.
He is given to a very definite and specifically angry understanding of the
mainstream economic systems in which he is living and maybe those concerns
also spill over into his dreams and the visions he implies having had. Indeed, if
he has gone a-dream-voyaging, it is possible he has actually experienced
Hieronymous Bosch-like scenes of hell explicitly, though with different figures in

their place. Either way, his economic concerns are definitely moralistic in nature,
and not purely theoretical.
Pound is also positioning himself in relation to other visionary philosopher-poets,
with Dante being the specific (and loudly-asserted) example here. It reminds one
of the question: what is the organization that Pound has absolutely by this point
joined, what is its mythology about itself, and which artistic figures in history
does it claim as historical members? Doubtless the group, like Pound, traces
itself back to antiquity: is Pounds Eleusinian origins-story the default, or a
departure from the groups main narrative? How do Dante and the GuelphGhibbeline political split fit into it? How about other political movements, occult
and pseudo-occult (like the Jacobins, the Albigensians, and others) fit into this
story, if at all?
The demonic and the hellish are, for Pound, insectile and scatological; when
Pound does experience hell, evil, or dark magics, along with darkness (as
absence-of-light) there should be scatological and insectile images or nuances to
it.
Next time, well read Canto XVI, which rounded out the first major publication of
the Cantos in 1924, as A Draft of XVI Cantos; I will, if I can, also dig into another
text to make up the difference. (Probably Pounds memoir of Henri GaudierBrzeska, an artist who died in The Great War.) But if I cannot get the time to
read another text, Ill at least draw some conclusions about the Pound of my
story a Pound who will, for significant portions of the text, be up to and around
this time, the 1925 or so, at least during the first part of the book.
(I do wish to bring it back to his youth, and to ride the Poundian train all the way
into his incarceration in (and final release from) St. Elizabeths in Washington. Of
course, at the same time, another part of me has been wondering whether I
wouldnt rather write of a poet in some other world, rather like Pound; Im not
sure, but I suspect it will be less difficult to drum up readership for a book about
someone imaginary than ol Ez. I guess well see how I feel when the summer
rolls in.)