The great ball of crystal: Reflection and interaction in Ezra Pound's poetry

The phenomenon of reflection has long been appropriated by the mimetic theory of art, beginning with Plato's mirror analogue, and testified to recently by M. H. Abrams' Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Its contradistinction with light constitutes one permutation in a series of dualistic oppositions between the eternal and the phenomenal, and Pound's early disparagement of reflection subscribes to this dualistic distinction. However, along with his appreciation of reflective images in the poets before him, especially Dante and Cavalcanti, and his interest in Allen Upward, whose whirl-swirl and magic crystal give to the convertibility of matter and energy in modern physics suggestive configurations, in Pound's poetry the mirror grows into the full plenitude of a crystal, reflecting and emitting light, symbolizing a union of the eternal and the phenomenal in the hypostasis of the poetic form.;This "great ball of crystal," this union of light and reflection in a plenitude, however, may lead to a reification of poetry in isolation from its environment, contrary to the original motive of the syncretic effort. The aesthete's brittle crystal imagery has revealed this danger, a danger which Pound acknowledges in Mauberley, and hopes to overcome in planning his major poem as an epic including history. An aesthetic strain remains in his poetry, however, until history intrudes and the ending of the Second World War catapults Pound into a reconsideration of the relationship between poetry and man's daily existence. This reconsideration modifies not only the sinister quality of the crystal imagery in the cantos before Pisa, but also the tenuous relationship between form and flux as manifested in the distancing between vision and quotidian existence, male and female, and life and death in the earlier cantos. Now the final effect of Pound's reification of the crystal is a return of the luminous form to Heraclitean flux, with form and flux interacting, the one being the potential for the other. In this interaction, identities and human endeavors will not be lost, but gain a new basis, just as the Cantos completes itself by opening up to flux and vicissitudes.