Essays Nature, Reality and Language in Pound, Yeats, and Mandelstam

Nature and ‘Paradiso Terrestre’: Nature, Reality and Language in Pound, Yeats, and Mandelstam

Ian Probstein
Touro College

Published in The McNeese Review 45 (2008): 55-75



In their strive for modernism and “making it new” poets of the turn of the 20th century were divided, so to speak, into two main opposite trends: the futurists, who denied the past, the tradition, who called “to throw the past overboard,” to quote Mayakovsky, and those who were seeking renewal of language and poetry in foreign cultures, tradition, in “cross fertilization between different languages,” in Pound’s dictum. In her book on Mandelstam, Clare Cavanagh subtly observes that “the mobile polyglot unity of Eliot’s or Pound’s English, like Mandelstam’s Russian, allows for and even requires the continuous contributions of the outsiders. Their world culture is no less dependent on the generosity of strangers” (Cavanagh 22). Pound’s celebrated manner of rhyming ideas, citations, and languages is strikingly akin to Mandelstam’s praise of “the orgy of quotations” and of the abundance of ‘lexical thrusts’ he finds at work in Dante’s Divine Comedy (CPL 401). Further, it is hard to disagree with Cavanagh that “Mandelstam, Eliot, and Pound began their careers with a quest for what Eliot calls ‘a living and central tradition,’ and their search for the center of world culture took all three “exiled wondering poets” to the same source—to the Mediterranean, to the ancient worlds of Greece and Rome, and to the Romance cultures that sprung up where Rome has sown its colonies” (Cavanagh 17).
Further, the affinities between Mandelstam and Pound are also found in their relation to nature. Out of sixty-six meanings distinguished in the notion of “nature” or “natura” by O. Lovejoy and George Boas in Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity, I will choose two out of three (the first and the third) that were proposed by Burton Hatlen’s essay “Pound and Nature”:
“1) Nature as a system of powers immanent in organic life forms and even in inorganic matter; 2) nature as a play of physical and chemical processes” (Hatlen 163).
In addition, I will draw on Mandelstam’s and Pound’s views on the nature of word (the title’s of a programmatic Mandelstam’s essay), art and poetry in relation to nature since both Pound and Mandelstam were opposed to symbolism, preferring rather to go back to Mediaevalism and Hellenism thus restoring meanings of words bringing objects back to nature. Naturally, the starting point will be focused on the relation of the three poets to human nature that will inevitably lead to the conflict between Mandelstam’s and Pound’s “earthly paradise” (“paradiso terrestre”), to quote Pound, and “the artifice of eternity,” the dream of the lyrical hero of “Sailing to Byzantium.”
As has been stated by several Yeats’s scholars—John Unterecker, Denis Donoghue, M.L. Rosenthal, Patrick J. Keane among others—the quest in “Sailing to Byzantium” symbolizes Yeats’s thirst to overcome human frailty and to sail “out of nature into perfection.” Like Keats, he is striving to overcome human passions (“a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue”). Yeats speaks of “dying generations,” thus alluding to both Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (“hungry generations”) and to the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“When old age should this generation waste…”). As was mentioned by Kenner, “’Great-rooted blossomer’; and a public man of 60 has no more than a scarecrow’s reality, a tattered coat upon a stick,

Unless
Soul clap its hands and sing and louder sing
For every tatter in the mortal dress…

To be is a verb. “Sailing to Byzantium” moreover is a transformation wrought on two Odes of Keats, about a bird not born for death and about a Grecian artifice of reality” (Kenner 164).
Yeats goes further than Keats declaring that a frail human being overcome by passions is just an animal: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity.” However, unlike his great predecessor, Yeats is so powerfully passionate in his desire to break with nature that his ties to nature and humanity are reinforced in spite of his desire to be gathered “in the artifice of eternity.”
On the contrary, Mandelstam and Pound do not see a contradiction between nature or reality and eternity or, to use the poets’ imagery, between “earthly paradise” and “the artifice of eternity.” In the Pisan Cantos Pound responded in French to Baudelaire’s “Les paradis artificiels” and to Yeats’s “artifice of eternity”: “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel” (C. 83/548). Pound does not deny or defy nature and reality even in a “gorilla cage”. In his Drafts and Fragments Pound reinstates his approach to reality and being: “I tried to make a paradiso / terrestre.” [earthly paradise] // I have tried to write Paradise.” (Notes for C. 117/822.) Likewise, Mandelstam, from his early poems (“My breath, my warmth has been already / Laid upon the panes of eternity,” 1908) to the last written in exile in Voronezh after his first term in Stalin’s prison and in anticipation of further persecution, has always viewed eternity and heaven as natural and achieved through art and poetry. Art gives Mandelstam the strength to leave space for "the desolate garden of numbers, / to break a seeming permanence / and accordance of causes," to see “How the big Universe is sleeping / In the cradle of little Eternity. “ (“Ottave.”) In his later poem of 1937, Mandelstam wrote:

I will say it in draft, in a whisper
Since the time has not come yet:
The game of the instinctive heaven
Is attained through experience and sweat.

And beneath a temporary sky
Of purgatory we often forget
That this happy heaven’s depot
Is our expending and lifetime haven. (1937)

Having gone through all the circles of earthly hell and purgatory and anticipating his own arrest and perhaps death, Mandelstam nevertheless claims that heaven is a “lifetime home” creating thus his own pattern of “Paradiso terrestre.” Unlike Yeats, Mandelstam does not see a contradiction between nature and eternity and has never dreamed of departing from nature; he even feels inferior to it:

Ne u menia, ne u tebia – u nikh
Vsia sila okonchanii rodovykh…

[It’s not I, not you – it’s they / Who have the entire strength of the gender (ancestral) endings.] In his usual manner, Mandelstam simultaneously implies several meanings in the word “rodovoi’: “ancestral” and “generic,” thus alluding to being and procreation, as well as “gender,” alluding to creativity).] He then states that “porous reeds are singing naturally in the wind, / and the snails of human lips (the metaphor speaks for itself) / will gratefully absorb their breathing heaviness.” Mandelstam urges (addressing himself rather than his readers) “to enter their cartilage / and you will be the heir of their kingdoms. // And for humans, for their living hearts / Wandering in their curves and twists, / You will picture both their pleasures / And the pain that tortures them in time of tides.” On another occasion he wrote: “Na podvizhnoi lestnitse Lamarka / Ia zaimu posledniuiu stupen’” [On Lamarck’s flexible scale / I will take the lowest stair], alluding to Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of organic evolution, which Mandelstam openly admired both in his poetry and in prose: “Lamarck feels the rifts between classes. He hears the pauses and syncopes in the evolutionary line.” Before that he noted, “In Lamarck’s reversed, descending movement down the ladder of living creatures resides the greatness of Dante. The lower forms of organic existence are humanity’s Inferno” (CPL 367). Yet the poet's duty is to reveal the joys and pains of those unnamed and unconscious creatures, that is, to name the unnamed. As was correctly noted by Toporov, “A poet … gives his reader a gift of what is preserved in his ancestral memory, which in the most rare cases binds a child to something that existed before civilization, before speech and even before birth with that foundation (S pervoosnovoi zhizni slito [Merged with the foundation of life]) that is the content and the meaning of those ‘recollections’ explicated from chaos…” (Toporov 435).
Ezra Pound came as close to Mandelstam’s perception of nature as no other poet known to me:

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world.
Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry… (C. 81/541)

Both Pound and Mandelstam are not afraid of a scientific approach to nature and are consistently faithful to it. In the ABC of Reading and in Cantos, Pound mentions biologist Louis Agassiz and in D & F a Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), who invented Systema Naturae (The System of Nature, the title of his book of 1735), a system for classifying animals, plants, and minerals, thus making order out of chaos. Likewise, Mandelstam wrote about the theory of evolution both in poetry and in prose. In his essay “To the Problem of the Scientific Style of Darwin” (1932), Mandelstam links Darwin’s evolution theory with the discoveries of Linnaeus and Lamarck; this essay can be viewed, so to speak, as an outline of his poems “Lamarck” and the poems “It’s not I, not you – it’s they / Who have the entire power of the gender (ancestral) endings” and “The Monasteries of Snails and Shells” from “Octaves.”
Like Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, the later poems of Mandelstam written in Voronezh exile reveal his anxiety and his desire to overcome loneliness and separation from life in three major ways. As was noticed by M.L. Gasparov, Mandelstam considered himself belonging to the fourth estate, and, therefore, unlike Marina Tsvetaeva, was not proud of being an outcast at first. Hence, the first way for him was seeking forgiveness and an attempt of repentance: the so-called ‘Stalin’s’ “Ode,” “Stanzas” (“The heart needs to beat”) and the like. The second way reveals Mandelstam’s thirst of life and his acute feeling and vision of it. In addition to “Lamarck’s flexible scale” and the poems of this cycle mentioned above, there is a peculiar poem reminding of Pound’s The Pisan Cantos, especially C. 83:

And brother Wasp is building a very neat house
Of four rooms, one shaped like a squat Indian bottle.

Mandelstam:
Armed with the vision of narrow wasps
Sucking the axis of the earth, the axis of the earth,
I feel all that I have had to watch
And recollect by heart and in vain.

I neither paint nor sing,
Nor do I run a black-voiced bow across the strings —
I just sting into life and love
To envy the mighty cunning wasps.

Oh, if only an air’s barb and summer warmth
Could have made me —
Passing sleep and death —
Hear the axis of the earth, the axis of the earth.
(1937)

Similarly, Pound is vacillating between humbleness (“Pull down thy vanity”), despair (“caged: “Nothing, nothing that you can do”), and a thirst for life:
When the mind swings by a grass blade
an ant’s forefoot shall save you
the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower (c. 83)

It is notable that Pound in “a gorilla cage” and Mandelstam in Voronezh exile, which he perceives as “a lion’s den” alluding to The Book of Daniel, are both thirsty of life and think of an earthly paradise. Pound exclaims: “Will I ever see the Giudecca again?” Likewise, Mandelstam appeals to France: “I beg as compassion and grace, / Your earth and your honeysuckle, France.” In this poem the Russian poet asserts that “a violet is still a violet in a prison cell.”
The third way of overcoming forceful separation from life for Mandelstam is “nostalgia for world culture” in search of harmony of France, Italy, the Mediterranean and of “the blessed islands” of the Greek Archipelago. Here again, there is an affinity between Mandelstam’s and Pound’s admiration of François Villon:

Spitting at the spider’s rights,
An impudent scholar, a stealing angel,
Unrivaled Villon François
Played tough tricks near Gothic sites.

He is a heavenly robber,
It is not shameful to sit near him:
Before the very end of the world
Skylarks will still ring and warble. (1937)

It is notable that in his essay on Villon, Mandelstam, like Pound in “Montcorbier, Alias Villon,” emphasizes Villon’s medievalism, his ability to combine both the plaintiff and the defendant in his own persona, stating that his self-compassion lacks self-pity and self-centeredness, and, which is most important, Villon’s thirst for reality, his denial of abstract notions and ability to combine gaunt reality with the vision of divine. Similarly, Pound states that Villon “is utterly mediæval, yet his poems mark the end of mediæval literature” (170-171), “he recognizes the irrevocable, he blames no one but himself” (172) and “his poems are gaunt as the Poema del Cid is gaunt; they treat of actualities, they are unattained with fancy; in the Cid death is death, war is war. In Villon filth is filth, crime is crime; neither crime nor filth is gilded” (The Spirit of Romance 173).
Like Pound, Mandelstam feels sympathy for “a heavenly robber,” finally associating himself with outcasts and exiles, alluding to Ovid, Dante, Villon. There is a motif of wandering as exile and a spiritual kinship with Ovid, and through Ovid with Pushkin, who also addressed his poem to the Roman poet (“To Ovid,” 1821) from his Southern exile, as was noted by Przybylski . Such poems as “Thalassa and thanatos of Greecian flutes” and “the dance of Muses on stone spurs of Pieria” reveal Mandelstam’s nostalgia for a natural life in an unnatural totalitarian state. There is a certain antagonism and an attempt to escape the reality of a totalitarian state, not his human nature. He strives for the “blessed islands” and the time where “no one eats hard-earned bread / Where there is only honey, wine, and milk, / Where a creaking labor does not darken the sky, / And the wheel turns lightly.” As was brilliantly demonstrated by Przsybylski, Mandelstam is longing for the islands of the Greek Archipelago, going as far back as to Hesiod’s Theogonia in which the dance of the Muses, born in Pieria, is shown. To be more exact, they descended from the mountains of Helicon to the valleys (among them was the valley of Tempe in the land Phaecia, the last stop of Ulysses on his way home and a probable site of the town from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”). Przybylski states that Hölderlin called those islands beloved, Byron “Blessed Isles” and “Leconte de Lisle did not hesitate to call the archipelago holy” (Przybylski 187). Hence Mandelstam’s quest for the birthplace of civilization and culture.
On the other hand, as was observed by Yefim Etkind, Mandelstam seemingly humorous poem of 1931 “Ia skazhu tebe s poslednei priamotoi” [I will tell you with the last (ultimate) frankness] expresses his bitterness and disillusionment in his quest of “world civilization”:

I will tell you this, my lady,
With final candor,
All is folly — sherry-brandy,
Oh, my angel.

Where Beauty shone
To a Hellene,
Disgrace gazed at me
From a black hole.

Greeks stole Helen
Along the sea,
While I taste a salty brine
On my lips.

Void will soil my lips
And disgrace,
Poverty will cock a grim snook
At my face.

Oh, lo, is that so, drink or sail,
It’s all the same;
Angel Mary, drink your cocktail,
Gulp your wine.

I will tell you this, my lady,
With final candor,
All is folly — sherry-brandy,
Oh, my angel. (1931)

Etkind presumes that this poem of 1931 is “Mandelstam’s esthetic self-denial: “Beauty, that was the purport of art and being, has not endured the test of time and life; it turned out to be a common ugliness, Achaean men turned ordinary Greeks, who, like vulgar criminals, had just kidnapped Helen” (Etkind 241, translation is mine). In my view, Etkind overstates and oversimplifies Mandelstam’s ‘self-denial’: it is rather the denial of such conditions in which beauty becomes ugliness; the motive of this poem is a concealed bitterness disguised as mockery of breaking with world culture when time is “out of joint.” Moreover, as was stated by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the poem was written “during a drinking party [popoika] in the Zoological Museum,” and, therefore, cannot be interpreted as a serious refutation of any previous ideas or as “an esthetic self-denial.” In the poem of 1937 “Zabludils’ia ia v nebe — shto delat’?” [I got lost in heaven — what’s to be done?], Mandelstam reveals both his metaphysical and physical fear. It was easier for those who, like Dante, were close to it, but we are unable to have the same feelings to God, heaven, and humans, as Dante had. In his thirst for life threatened by the real death, perhaps an execution, he denies a “sharp-tender laurel” striving for a “Florentine nostalgia.” (He uses the same word “toská” that he coined to express his thirst for world culture.) In the version of the same poem, “dvoichatka” [a double], as Nadezhda Mandelstam called them, or a “twin poem,” to use the term of Kirill Taranovsky , the poet begs an unnamed cup-bearer (perhaps the one who deprived him of the cup at the feast of his forefathers [“Za Gremuchuiu Doblest’”]) to give him strength to drink to the health of the turning tower, / a wrestling crazy azure.”
It is a well-established fact that many scholars of Mandelstam have stated (the most important and profound works were by Taranovsky, Ronen, Eikhenbaum, M. Gasparov, and Semenko ), that Mandelstam's poetry is extremely esoteric and is built upon hidden allusions and associations with Russian, European as well as Classical poetry. Here again the affinity with Pound and T.S. Eliot is quite evident — hence their thirst for world culture. Nonetheless, already in The Age,” “January 1, 1924,” and other Mandelstam’s poems of this period, a strong thirst for contemporaneity can be felt in the verses of “the aging son of a century.”
However, in the essay dedicated to modern Russian poetry “Promezhutok' [“The Gap” or “The Space Between”], Iuri Tynianov wrote about the “bloom” of contemporary Russian prose and the “decline” of poetry in the 1920s. Comparing the poetry of Pasternak and Mandelstam Tynianov wrote that “... a word in Pasternak's creativity is turned into almost a palpable thing, in that of Mandelstam a thing becomes an abstraction [a versified abstraction]” (Tynianov 189; translation is mine). Tynianov continues that the peculiarity of Mandelstam's poetry is that it has “not a word, but shades of words and meanings,” that his work resembles “the work of almost a foreigner on the literary language” (Tynianov 190-191). This was, probably, to some extent true as far as Mandelstam's two first books were concerned (though Tynyanov's essay was written after “January 1, 1924” had been published).
Mandelstam also claimed to be a contemporary: “It's time you knew: I'm a contemporary too.” I would argue that both Mandelstam's theoretical views and his art of that period (“The Age,” “January 1, 1924,” and his later poems, especially those of Moscow and Voronezh period) prove that he too was seeking reality, life.
His understanding of reality and realism was revealed in a mathematical equation and was opposed to the slogan of Viacheslav Ivanov “a realibus as realiora” [from real to the most real] proposed in his 1909 book of essays By the Stars: “A=A what a magnificent theme for poetry! Symbolism languished and yearned for the law of identity. Acmeism made it its slogan and proposed its adoption instead of the ambiguous a realibus as realiora” (CPL 65). It is notable that in their search of reality and of “making it new” both Pound and Mandelstam turn to the Middle Ages and to Provence. As Mandelstam wrote in “The Morning of Acmeism,”

The Middle Ages are very close to us because they possessed to an extraordinary degree the sense of boundary and partitions. They never confused different levels, and treated the beyond with utmost restraint. A noble mixture of rationality and mysticism as well as a feeling for the world as a living equilibrium makes us kin to this epoch and encourages us to derive strength from the works which arose on Romance soil around the year 1200. (CPL 66)

This thought almost exactly coincides with what Pound wrote in the chapter “Il Miglior Fabbro” dedicated to Arnaut Daniel: “The Twelfth century, or, more exactly, that century whose center is the year 1200, has left two perfect gifts: the church of San Zeno in Verona, and the canzoni of Arnaut Daniel; by which I would implicate all that is most excellent in the Italian-Romanesque architecture and in Provençal minstrelsy” (The Spirit of Romance 22). Pound started with The Spirit of Romance and during his entire life was faithful to “the spirit, which arose on Romance soil around the year 1200.” Besides the common features between Mandelstam, Pound and T.S. Eliot subtly observed by Cavanagh in her book on Mandelstam, the affinity of their ideas is due to the affinity of their sources. For Mandelstam, who translated The Song of Roland into Russian and like Pound wrote poems and essays dedicated to Dante and Villon, Hellenism, Medievalism, Classical antiquity and Medievalism were more contemporary and real than the works of the symbolists. In his essay “Nature of Word” (1921-22) Mandelstam opposes Hellenism to symbolism revealing his attitude towards reality:

Hellenism is the conscious surrounding of man with domestic utensils instead of impersonal objects; the transformation of impersonal objects into domestic utensils, and the humanizing and warming of the surrounding world with the most delicate teleological warmth... In the Hellenistic sense, symbols are domestic utensils, but then any object brought into man's sacred circle could become a utensil and consequently, a symbol. (CPL 127-128)

Mandelstam argues, that “there is essentially no difference between a word and an image. An image is merely a word which has been sealed up, which cannot be touched. An image is inappropriate for everyday use, just as an ikon lamp would be inappropriate for lighting a cigarette.” Then, by applying his views on the nature of a symbol to the school of Russian Symbolism which he called “pseudo-Symbolism,” Mandelstam concludes that

Jourdain discovered in his old age that he had been speaking “prose” all his life. The Russian Symbolists discovered the same prose, the primordial, image-bearing nature of the word. They sealed up all words, all images, designating them exclusively for liturgical use. An extremely awkward situation resulted: no one could move, nor stand up, nor sit down. One could no longer eat at table because it was no longer simply a table. One could no longer light a lamp because it might signify unhappiness later (CPL 128-29).

Likewise, Pound in “Vorticism” was attacking symbolism stating exactly the same:

The symbolists dealt in “association,” that is, in a sort of allusion, almost an allegory. They degraded the symbol to the status of a word. They made it a form of metonymy. One can be grossly “symbolic,” for example, by using the term “cross” to mean “trial.” The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance, like the signs a, b, and x in algebra. (GBR 84)

It is notable that Pound in his essay of 1914 and Mandelstam in “The Morning of Acmeism” (1913) compare poetry to mathematics:

The sight of a mathematician who produces without effort the square of some ten-digit number fills us with a certain wonderment. But too often do we fail to see that a poet raises a phenomenon to the tenth power, and the modest appearance of the work of art frequently deceives us with respect to the monstrously condensed reality which it possesses. (CPL 61 emphasis added)

Freidin stated that “in turn-of-the-century Europe, intensity in association with the paradigmatic (or, as in Mandelstam, the ‘condensed reality’ of a mathematical formula) denoted a phenomenon commanding the sort of reverence and respect afforded hidden springs of a tremendous power” (Freidin 12).
However, Mandelstam later would go further and claim that “poetry is not a part of nature” and that it creates a different reality. In his essay “The Slump” [Vypad] he argues that poetry “is not obliged to anyone, perhaps its creditors are all fraudulent!” (CPL 202). In the “Conversation about Dante” he states:

Poetry is not a part of nature, not even its best or choicest part, let alone the reflection of it — this would make a mockery of the axioms of identity; rather, poetry establishes itself with astonishing independence in a new extraspatial field of action, not so much narrating as acting out in nature by means of its arsenal of devices, commonly known as tropes (CPL 397, emphasis added).

Likewise, Pound emphasized the importance of image: “The image is the poet’s pigment. The painter should use his colour because he sees it or feels it. I don’t much care whether he is representative or non-representative. He should depend, of course, on the creative, not upon mimetic or representational part in his work” (GBR 86). Further, there is a striking affinity in Mandelstam’s and Pound’s views on the nature of poetry. In the “Conversation About Dante” Mandelstam asserts:

It is only with the severest qualifications that poetic discourse or thought may be referred to as “sounding”; for we hear in it only the crossing of two lines, one of which, taken by itself, is completely mute, while the other, abstracted from its prosodic transmutation, is totally devoid of significance and interest, and is susceptible of paraphrasing, which, to my mind, is surely a sign of non-poetry. For where there is amenability to paraphrase, there the sheets have never been rumpled, there poetry, so to speak, has never spent the night. (CPL 397.)

Pound distinguishes “three kinds of poetry,” that is “MELOPŒIA, wherein the words are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing of trend of that meaning.

PHANOPŒIA, which is a casting of images upon their visual imagination.
LOGOPŒIA, ‘the dance of the intellect among words.’” (LE 25)

In the ABC of Reading, very similarly to Mandelstam, he maintains: “Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music” (ABC 61).
Both Pound and Mandelstam were concerned with the renewal of literature, especially, of the language of poetry, but both considered futurism as a narrow-minded escape from the past and from the tradition. As Pound said in “Vorticisim” defying Marinetti, “We do not desire to evade comparison with the past. We prefer that the comparison be made by some intelligent person whose idea of “the tradition” is not limited by the conventional taste of four or five centuries and one continent” (GBR 90). In addition to this objection, in the “Morning of Acmeism” Mandelstam opposes futurism, aiming primarily at Mayakovsky:

The Futurists, unable to cope with the conscious sense as creative material, frivolously threw it overboard and essentially repeated the crude mistake of their predecessors.
For the Acmeists the conscious sense of the word, the Logos, is just as magnificent a form as music is for the Symbolists.
And if, for the Futurists, the word as such is still down on its knees creeping, in Acmeism it has for the first time assumed a dignified upright position and entered the Stone Age of its existence (CPL 62).

Pound would be the last modernist to defy Logos since he managed to express the same idea in an aphoristic form: “Great Literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (ABC 36).
Without knowing that he was writing about the first translator of his poetry into Russian, Pound wrote in “Vorticism”: “A Russian correspondent, after having called it [Pound’s poem “Heather”] a symbolist poem, and having been convinced that it was not symbolism, said slowly: “I see, you wish to give people new eyes, not to make them see some new particular thing” (GBR 85). The correspondent was Zinaida Vengerova, who happened to be the wife of Mandelstam’s professor at Petersburg University, a prominent scholar Semen Vengerov, and was the first translator of Pound and other Des Imagistes into Russian. Vengerova published her essay in Strelets [Sagittarius] in 1915 and entitled it nevertheless “The English Futurists.” However, the peculiar detail emphasized by her was the new vision, “making it new” expressed in the image that almost literally renders Khlebnikov’s image:

And with horror
I understood — no one could see me.
I would have to sow eyes.
My task was to be a sower of eyes!
(“The Solitary Player”)

Thus both Mandelstam and Pound were opposed to symbolism, futurism, and mimesis. Mandelstam’s understanding of reality was, probably, closer to that of Ortega y Gasset who believed that there were as many realities as points of view (the so-called “perspectivism”). Mandelstam’s reality is always a condensed image. Sometimes his reality is close to impressionism:

Impressionism

The artist painted
How deeply lilacs fainted,
And ringing colors, layer over layer,
He dabbed like scabs on canvas.

He grasped the thickness of oil:
His patched summer boils
Heated by a violet brain
Dilated in a sultry air.

And a shade, shade grows more violet,
A whistle or a whip dies as a matchstick, —
You’ll say: chefs in the kitchen
Are cooking fat pigeons.

There is a hint of a swing,
Veils are vague, I guess,
And a bumblebee, a king,
Reigns in this summer mess.
(2 May 1932)

Sometimes it is closer to surrealism:
So play to the rapture of aorta
With a cat’s head in your mouth,
There were three devils, you’re the fourth,
The last, marvelous colorful sprite.

If we do not seek literal likeness, we would, probably, grasp an image-picture of this poem: “the rapture of aorta” is the fate of an artist, “the cat's head in your mouth” is a sound image inspired by the performance of the lady-violinist (Galina Barinova, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam's “Commentaries” ), “the devils” were, perhaps, Paganini and Veniavsky. The images-pictures of these two poems are akin to the paintings of the Russian artists − the former to Falk and the latter to Chagall. Yet, Mandelstam was a contemporary concerned with life and time present: “Just try and rip me out of the time! —//You'll wring your own neck, I'm telling you!” His thirst for reality was almost as great as his thirst for world culture. Although his approach to reality and time was often hostile, we can see that his attitude to it was far from being straightforward. The most vivid example of Mandelstam’s complex approach to art and reality is revealed in his visionary poem “The Verses on the Unknown Soldier” that evokes his vision of the past, present and future of humankind based on history and science.
Like Pound, Mandelstam is persistently following scientific inventions of his time and is aware that science can bring destruction and chaos, as he predicted in “The Verses on The Unknown Soldier” (1937), and Pound in C. 115:

The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
(Canto 115/814).

I would say that Mandelstam evokes human nature in even a more dramatic and contradictory way in his “The Verses on The Unknown Soldier.” Beginning with a vision of a human ocean lacking seeing and foreseeing (“Let this air be my eyewitness, / His long-range heart, / In the dug-out — omnivorous, active / Substance — a windowless ocean strives. “), “The Verses on The Unknown Soldier” then reveal a cosmic vision:

Through the ether of ten-digit zeroes
The light of speeds ground down to a ray
Starts a number, made lucent and clear
By the bright pain of holes and moles.

And a new battlefield beyond the field of fields
Flies like a triangular flock of cranes,
The news flies like a new light-dust,
And it’s bright from the yesterday’s fight.

The news flies like a new light-dust:
—I am not Leipzig, not Waterloo,
Not the Battle of Nations — I am new,
I will dazzle the world with my light.

Arabian mess, mash and hash,
The light of speeds ground down to a ray —
And trampling my retina with its squint soles,
The beam flattens the pupil of my eye.

Besides Pound’s Canto 115, Mandelstam’s vision here is akin to Yeats’s “Second Coming” and to Pound’s “Hell Cantos.” However, the Russian poet’s vision differs from that of Yeats since it is revealed in an incredible blend of a scientific vocabulary and at the same time genuine metaphors. Even though Mandelstam begins with the hell of past wars, and the very first lines quoted above allude to WWI, Mandelstam’s “Soldier” also differs from Pound’s “Hell Cantos” since it acquires a cosmic vision and goes far beyond particulars.
The vision of Mandelstam’s poem emphasizes such a state of humanity, in which the light itself becomes darkness. Thus Mandelstam’s “light” differs, of course, from Pound’s “Nous.” In the end of the poem written mostly in the 3rd person, Mandelstam shifts to the first person singular to “dissolve in humanity”:

Aortas are flooded with blood,
And a whisper spreads through the ranks:
—”I was born in the year ninety-four,
—I was born in the year ninety-two…”
And squeezing in my fist a worn date of birth,
With bloodless lips I whisper amid crowd and herd:
“I was born on the night of the second and third
Of January in the unreliable year
Of ninety-one, and the centuries
Encircle me with fire.”

The end of the poem does not only symbolize Mandelstam’s reunion with mankind on the eve of annihilation and his vision of the Last Judgment, but it is also a foreseeing of his own horrible fate, when “squashing” a number in his fist, deprived of his name and personality, the poet will be dissolved in the multitudes of persecuted exiles thrown to Stalin’s camps. In a way, Mandelstam’s vision is more terrifying than Dante’s Hell since even the worst criminals in Inferno preserve their names and personalities. However, in the poem of 1937 quoted in the beginning (written the same year as “Verses of the Unknown Soldier”), Mandelstam says that the sky of purgatory is temporary, and though we forget that in our suffering, “This happy heaven’s depot / Is our expending and lifetime home.” Thus Mandelstam fearlessly faces reality and like Pound claims that paradise is earthly. Different as they are, both Mandelstam and Pound have chosen reality of life and art when confronted by death and annihilation.
Great poets of the 20th century, they were seeking renewal of the language, poetry and art by “charging the language with meaning to the utmost degree” and conveying their vision in images. Though they all were seeking reality, they did not do it in a literal way; for them it was, first and foremost, a spiritual reality. Therefore they saw one of the main sources of the renewal in their quest to the birthplace of civilization, to Hellas, the Mediterranean, and, which is more characteristic for Mandelstam and for Pound, in Medievalism. Unlike Yeats, either Mandelstam or Pound never attempted to escape reality and time present. Neither were they seeking “the artifice of eternity.” As was stated above, Mandelstam and Pound did not see a contradiction between nature, reality and eternity, and each of them was trying to create his “earthly paradise” in his own way. Both Mandelstam and Pound had akin attitude towards nature “as a system of powers immanent in organic life forms and even in inorganic matter”, to human nature, to nature as “as a play of physical and chemical processes” (Hatlen 163) as well as to the natural science and scientific language. Both of them sought ways to overcome symbolism, futurism, and had the same approach to mimesis. Although they have never read a line of each other’s writings, the affinities between Mandelstam and Pound were due to the affinities of their sources: Hellenism, High Antiquity, Medievalism, Dante, Villon.

Abbreviations:
ABC — Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1960.
CPL — Mandelstam, Osip. The Complete Critical Prose and Letters. Trans. J. G. Harris and Constance Link. Ed. Jane Gary Harris. Ann Arbor, Michign: Ardis, 1979.
GBR — Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska. A Memoir, New York: New Directions, 1970.
D& F — Pound, Ezra. Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX—CXVII (1969). The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1996.


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