[log in to unmask] writes:
>>But Surette at least shows no interest in
>>Pound's poetry, casting the issue entirely as a question of Pound's
>>presumed beliefs, within the context of 19th and 20th century
>>intellectual history. (Indeed, Surette says as much in The Birth of
>>Modernism: "The rationale of this study is much closer to the old
>>method of the history of ideas" (5).)And as long as we try to read
>>Pound as primarily a "thinker," we will, I think, miss the point. The
>>poet is a maker, and we need to be talking about what he MADE, not
>>about what he may or may not have "thought."
>>
>>Burt Hatlen

>I am not sure how we can make the distinction which Burt Hatlen asks us
>to.
>Virtually everything we know about Pound comes from what he MADE (wrote,
>said, composed).   When anyone refers to Pound's "thought" they usually
>refer to what he MADE.  So what does it mean to speak about what Pound
>made
>apart from what he thought?   Ezra Pound the historical human being
>left his
>words recorded in poetry, prose, letters, articles, essays, radio
>broadcasts, etc.  He "made" all these things.  For instance, he "made"
>this
>statement about the Platonists, saying they

>   have caused man after man to be suddenly conscious
>  of the reality of nous, of mind, apart from any man's
>  individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring,
>  of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops
>  us, full of light
>    (G.K., 44).

>He also MADE this statement, in the same work:

>  I don't in the least wish I had missed a Xtian  edu-
>  cation in childhood, even though the old testament is
>  most certainly, in the main, a record of revolting barbar-
>  ism and turgid poesy.  The New, they tell me, is written
>  in disreputable Greek . . .
>   I am now aged enough to see nothing ridiculous in
>  19th french [freemasons] and freethinkers having their
>  offspring Christianly (that is catholicly) educated.
>   A culture persisted.  Only in basicly pagan Italy has
>  Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance.
>        (GK, 300).

>From these two statements which Pound MADE, one might conclude that
>Pound
>was highly sympathetic to Christianity and neoplatonism (if we assume
>that a
>neo-platonism which had sublated paganism is a sophisticated philosophy,
>purely consonant with a Christianity which has not cut off its pagan
>roots).
>  However, Pound also MADE this statement, a purely negative one about
>Christianity (one of many):

>  Christian proposals are mixed with all sorts of disorder,
>  whereas Confucian progress offers a chance for a steady
>  rise, and defects either in conduct or in theory are in
>  plain violation of its simple and central doctrine
>         (S.P., 69).

>From these words we might conclude that Pound thought Confucian
>philosophy
>was superior by far to Christianity in all its forms.

>The issue if far more complex than some people are letting on here.
>And it
>cannot be solved by simply saying that Pound believed in a little bit of
>everything, that he was a "poet" and therefore above believing
>anything, or
>that he believed in the "Cantos", that they are the expression of his
>belief, and that's that, so take it or leave it.

>There is much to be said on this subject.  Pound is not a demigod, as he
>admits; and his words are not holy scripture, or incomprehensible,
>simply
>because they are poetry.  God is infinite and incomprehensible, but
>Pound's
>record of, or expression of his communion with the infinite is itself
>finite, and subject to human efforts to define it---  carefully, and
>accurately.

>Regards,

>Wei

What strikes me here is Wei's total failure, even in this posting, to
talk about Pound's WORDS. In fact, he seems to find incomprehensible
the notion that language is, not simply a vehicle for ideas, but a
material fact in its own right, a plastic material that the poet molds
into shapes, no less than the sculptor frees the music inside the
stone, or the composer shapes a melodic line. But if language is the
material in which the poet composes, then the decision whether to write
a poem or to write a letter or a radio broadcast is a matter of some
consequences.  (Philip Sidney got the issue in a nutshell more than 400
years ago. "The poet he nothing affirmith"--whereas the writer of a
radio broadcast is, by the nature of the medium, "affirming" a set of
ideas.)

As far as I can tell, it is the materiality of language that fascinates
poets. That's why they worry about such matters as rhyme and meter--or,
in Pound's case, "absolute rhythm," or the "image," or the "vortex"--or
melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia. (These are NOT, by the way, three
kinds of poetry, as someone on this list said not long ago, but three
qualities present, in varying proportions, in all poetry.) Pound
defines "logopoeia" as the "play of ideas."  So that even when we're
talking about Pound's "ideas," it seems we should recognize that he's
interested in the PLAY of ideas.

Burt Hatlen