Frank Bidart, _Desire_

I BOUGHT THIS a year or two ago--that is, about twenty years after it was published--and I notice that my copy is from the fourteenth printing. I mean...that's pretty damn good, no? The print runs were probably not large, but fourteen printings suggests the book really took hold.

To my own surprise, since Bidart is accounted more a disciple of Lowell and Bishop, I thought of Ezra Pound while reading this. "The Return," for instance, about Roman soldiers in Germany coming across the remains of a legion that had been overwhelmed. Coincidentally, Pound has a poem of the same title, but what seemed Poundian was the focus on a precise but powerfully suggestive historical incident, the structure of the verse, the use of language from an ancient source (Tacitus), and the exploratory, circling nature of Bidart's poetic investigation of the event, which reminded me of Pound's "Near Perigord," also about long-ago warfare.

Some of the shorter poems in the first half of the book similarly put me in mind of Lustra-era Pound, so while I was reading "The Second Hour of the Night," the long poem in the second half of Desire, with its juxtaposition of Hector Berlioz's account of his marriage to Harriet Smithson and Ovid's version of the myth of Myrrha, it was hard not to think of the Cantos.

How crucial an influence upon the the possibilities for the long poem in the 20th & 21st centuries are The Cantos? Immense, don't we have to say, even if you don't much care for The Cantos itself, or for much of it? Who did more than Pound to liberate the long poem from narrative, to suggest other structural principles?

The toxicity of Pound's politics has done a lot to undermine his reputation, all too justifiably I'd have to say, but you couldn't write the history of 20th century poetry in English without him, if only for his importing a version of Chinese poetry into English and for dramatically expanding the possibilities for the long poem.