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Epos is not CoLd history
-Ezra Pound, letter to Lewis Maverick, 2 september 19571
I. INTRODUCTION
Ezra Pound's recollection of a conversation some thirty years earlier with the poet robert bridges, who loved the anglo-saxon lexis, and who strongly approved of the archaizing in Personae and Exultations, is the source of a passage in Canto 80:
"forloyn" said Mr bridges (robert)
"we'll get 'em all back"
meaning archaic words and there had been a fine old fellow
named furnivall2
Pound wrote elsewhere that bridges's enthusiasm for words like forloyn was not what he wanted to hear at a time when he "was just trying to find and use modern speech."3 forloyn is middle english hunting jargon, a word of french origin. a noun form of the word signifies "a note of recall" sounded by a hunter to bring home stragglers left behind by the main pack.4 once one knows that, forloyn is just right, what with the traces in bridges's slogan of samuel Taylor Coleridge's musings about the "reversionary wealth" of the english language.5 but perhaps, as Theodor adorno did in the case of some german contemporaries' writings, we should register the presence of "a greed for the archaic"?6 given Pound's carefully-framed quotation of bridge's remark, the author of the Cantos cannot be simply pigeon-holed as a nostalgist of the Teutonic tongues or sloganeer for linguistic authenticity.
In the passage above, notably, Pound sets "forloyn" into a sentence showing only that it belongs to the class of archaic words. The word's meaning can only be guessed at. Pound does put forloyn in a sentence in the final lines of his translation of guido Cavalcanti's sonnet 23 ("To dante, rebuking him for his way of life after the death of beatrice"):
Yet if thou'lt read this sonnet many a time
That malign spirit which so hunteth thee
Will sound forloyn and spare thy affrighted soul.7
English scholars, from Thomas Tyrrwhit to frederick furnivall, made Chaucerian words available to readers and poets.8 Pound, in this translation, produces an equivalent to Cavalcanti's italian that is not so different-in its reliance upon philological glossaries, at any rate-from Thomas Chatterton's procedures in inventing a rowleyan english. "get[ting] 'em (all) back," of course, calls for synchronic use as well as historical...