The educated reading such texts request is always a virtual one. Even somebody who is richly familiar with the commentaries and who has studied both sources and text can only hold onto fragments of both background and foreground, and then only for a more or less limited time.
What has happened, of course, is that eventually poets — if not other readers as well — have noted that, with or without access to the background armamentarium, there is nevertheless an experience of reading these texts. And numerous poets of the last forty years — if not, indeed, the last hundred — have tried to estheticize this affect directly.
Their forebear is Gertrude Stein — rather than Pound or Eliot. (The esoteric armamentarium model does not control the way we read, say, the prose in The Making of Americans or Lucy Church Amiably — not to mention in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or in William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels.) The representational task of such poets, as it is with Stein’s prose, was to generate a representation of thinking, rather than a specific and elaborated intellectual signified — as it still is, largely, in the poets who estheticize the affect without trying to pull together the intellectual background.
“Obscure” was the word applied to the hugely different Stein and Pound/Eliot/Joyce enterprises — though that Twentieth Century usage marks a major shift in the meaning of the word from its literary usage in the 19th Century.
A major 19th Century text to be labeled (perjoratively) obscure was Robert Browning’s poem in six Books, Sordello, that figures at the start of Pound’s “Canto II,” much as “Lambda” figures at the start of “Canto I.”
Sordello is the story of the poetic education of a 13th Century poet (Sordello) who begins as a page in a Mantua castle (with its “… maze of corridors contrived for sin, / Dusk-winding stairs, dim galleries…”). Some of its lessons parallel the young Browning’s own poetic growth. The situation the poem describes is the Guelph/Ghibellin conflict (Browning’s spelling) between Verona and Ferrara, the Pope and the House of Este (as well as the odd mountain bandit — or “Hill-cat,” Browning’s term), familiar to students of Dante. Today one makes one’s way fairly comfortably through the poem with the footnotes of Pettigrew and Collins in the Penguin edition — footnotes of the sort that one might expect for a well-edited historical reconstruction first published (March 7th) in 1840. The problem is that, to follow the surface story, one needs to know a fair bit of history. (The current Penguin Robert Browning, The Poems goes a good way toward providing us with it.) The problem with the problem, however (and what makes for the poem’s “obscurity”), is that, as one pursues the history on one’s own (as one would have had to do as a contemporary reader of the poem), one discovers now that this character whom history records as a Guelph, Browning portrays as a Ghibellin. Others whom history records as bitterest enemies, Browning portrays as fast friends. And still others who were dead by the time of the events, Browning shows us as alive and kicking. Grandson becomes son. And important historical characters, such as the real Sordello’s light o’ love, Cunizza (“a lusty lady, married five times,” notes editor Pettigrew), get squeezed out of the tale entirely.
A contemporary audience is likely to read this, in a young poet of 28, as simply his desire to tell whatever he wants to tell — letting history go hang, with perhaps a faint suspicion that a certain laziness as far as keeping on top of such research lies at the bottom of it all. But we would hardly conceive it as a major flaw: certainly it’s offset by the poet’s imagination. But though Pettigrew remarks, “… Ezra Pound, who found the poem a model of lucidity, is probably the only person who has ever seriously claimed to have understood Sordello,” the poem’s surface is no more confusing to the contemporary reader than, say, the surface of Keats’s Endymion — and is often a good deal less so. Though what this judgment reflects more than anything, I suspect, is the kind of understanding a contemporary reader, brought up on Milton and Spenser on the one hand, and The Cantos and Maximus Poems on the other, now look for, i.e., a discursive difference the beginning of which Pound’s early claim for comprehension signs.
Victorian readers felt, however, that if you bothered at all with a poem based on history, you should stick to the facts — or, that the alteration of facts should be meaningful, serving lucid, moral, or at any rate clear didactic, ends.
For the Victorians, Sordello’s obscurity lay not in its surface difficulty, but rather in the impossibility of justifying Browning’s historical deviance. Browning’s obscurity is the opposite of the High Modernists’. His surface is coherent. It was the organization of his intellectual armamentarium that was unbearably murky.
Although only 157 copies of Sordello were actually sold in the first ten years of the poem’s life, the charge of obscurity — the moral obscurity the clearing up of which would have justified Browning’s historical revisionism — besmirched Browning’s reputation for twenty-odd years after the poem appeared.
When, with the popularity of his later poetic collections, such as Dramatis Personae (1864) and the four-volume Ring and the Book (1868–69: i.e., the same years as Les Misérables and 20,000 lieues sous la mer…), attention turned back to Browning’s earlier work and “what it meant.” At that point, Browning made the famous quip that eventually would become enough a part of general literary folklore so that, some years before I entered high school, my father (no great reader, he) would quote it regularly and repeatedly to me, with a chuckle, as a warning against esthetic obscurity of any sort — and its wages — in the usual, if, in his case, gentle, bourgeois attack on abstraction in art and poetic difficulty (which for him included e. e. cummings just as much as T. S. Eliot). Browning had said: “When I first wrote Sordello, only God and I knew what it meant. Today, only God knows”—a judgment most late Twentieth-Century readers find wildly over the mark, unless we reawaken a fine understanding of the Victorian context.
“Sordello” (with quotes, i.e., the poem’s title) is a metonym for its topic: “the education of a poet.” And Sordello (without the quotes, i.e., the character) is a metonym for the character of the poet so educated. Read in this way, the obscurity (in the contemporary sense) of the opening tercet of Pound’s “Canto II” diminishes significantly:
Hang it all, Robert Browning,
There can be but one “Sordello.”
But Sordello, and my Sordello?
Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but one “poetic education.” But what about the poetic character so educated — and my poetic character so educated? Certainly this is a reasonable enough question for a poet who’s just finished contemplating the “most ancient poetic material” in the West — before Pound (who allegedly began writing this Canto sitting on the steps of a Venice Cathedral, looking out over the waters) let his thoughts return by way of the historical Sordels and the Chinese artist So-shu and Helen/Eleanor/eleptolis (destroyer of cities) back to Odysseus and the hell-spawned tale of high-born Tyro, the first queen the Traveler spoke with after receiving a truly extraordinary guilt trip from his mother, Anticleia.