Ezra Pound and Louise Glück

In Canto 1, Ezra Pound does what all my elementary school teachers told me not to do: he begins a sentence with “And.” Of course, Pound was breaking that rule on purpose. The Cantos begin in medias res, or in the middle of things, which is a common feature of literary epics like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Dante’s Divine Comedy. “And then went down the ship,” the poem begins, alluding to Odysseus’ journey to the underworld in Book XI of The Odyssey. What’s interesting about Canto 1 is the identity of its speaker. In line three, the plural pronoun of “We” indicates Odysseus and his men. But Pound intentionally brings himself into the mix in line 68, when Divus, the Latin translator of Homer’s Odyssey, is told to “Lie quiet.” Divus’ translation of Homer’s epic is the one Pound used for this canto, which is a loose translation of Divus’ translation of Homer. In a translation of a translation, the author identifies himself even as he identifies with Odysseus. For Pound, the epic was “a poem containing history,” which may seem like the most imprecise definition ever, but perhaps means that the past and the present have something to say to each other.

Louise Glück is another contemporary poet who draws from Homer’s epic. In “Circe’s Power,” she speaks from the perspective of Circe, who is the source of the wind that guides Odysseus’ journey to the underworld:

“Circe’s Power”

By Louise Glück

I never turned anyone into a pig.

Some people are pigs; I make them

Look like pigs.

I'm sick of your world

That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren't bad men;

Undisciplined life

Did that to them. As pigs,

Under the care of

Me and my ladies, they

Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness

As well as my power. I saw

We could be happy here,

As men and women are

When their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,

Your men with my help braving

The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,

Every sorceress is

A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can't

Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

Glück, like Pound, references Homer’s epic without losing the authority of the poem’s speaker. In “Circe’s Power,” Odysseus is the object of the narrator’s speech. In Canto 1, the reference to Circe’s wind as the source for the ship’s voyage to Hades is brief, almost taken for granted. Glück’s poem is another spin on the epic, boldly asserting Circe’s power in the poem’s concluding lines: “If I wanted only to hold you / I could hold you prisoner.” Both poems are rooted deeply in the past, raising important questions about history, authority, and the source of knowledge.