Pound Among the Nightingales — From the Troubadours to a Cantible Modernism

Abstract

As Dante long ago recognized — a recognition that Pound as the miglior fabbro is happy to endorse — the troubadour’s art is fundamentally international and multilingual. It derives much of its lyric potency through adopting and foreign words, thereby heightening its non-discursive and acoustic qualities. The songbird is the natural symbol of this kind of art. This essay demonstrates the profound influence of the Provençal lyric on Pound, showing how he learned, as Arnaut Daniel put it, to “file and preen, / and cut words clean,” and in doing so discovered a terse “modern” style. The multi-vocal dimension of Pound’s mature work arises directly out of his consideration of birdsong as a technical model for his own modern poetic jargon. His interest in dialect, barbarisms, and the acoustic and musical qualities of speech — the signature of his mature work — leads to language that is marked above all by its chameleonic heterogeneity.