Daniel Pearlman wrote:

> Jacob,
>
> On second thought, your equation of Pound/scriptor and Pound/Centaur
> raises a problem of self-contradiction.  The lone ant
> who survives the ruins of Europe is a very humbled Pound whose
> vanity has already been pulled down by history.

Humility does not become the epic (or would-be epic) poet, and it is
unrealistic I think for the reader to expect such in the epic voice. And the
whole of Canto 81 seems to involve expansion after expansion of "To have
gathered from the air a live tradition / ... / This is not vanity." (Does not
some Canto contain an allusion to or quoting of Horace's -- or Yeats's or both?
-- "I have made it from a mouthful of air"?) And some weight should be given to
the fact that the last name in the Canto is that of the minor poet Blunt, with
Pound boasting of having visited him. And the "Fragment (1966)"

                                That her acts
                                        Olga's acts
                                                    of beauty
                                        be remembered.

has still (rightly I think) the arrogance of Ovid's claim to be remembered
wherever Latin is read -- and of Shakespeare's boast in the sonnets of the
power to give immortality.

Moreover. Susanne Langer observed that there are no negatives in poetry -- they
serve only to bring before the reader the 'thing' negated. And Sidney had
already observed four hundred years ago that there are no positives in poetry
(The poet never lieth because the poet never affirmeth.) Thus the line (quoted
from memory),
                The gold light of wheat surging upward, ungathered
would be equally powerful whether we decided (as appears to be the case) it is
here a positive or we decided from some context that it was a negative. Pound
puts the thing (sometimes, in the Platonic tradition, very abstract or complex
'things,' like a whole complex of u.s. history viewed from a certain
perspective) before the reader's eyes; the reader not the poet decides what
he/she will do with it.

This is part of my objection both to Wei and to those who attack him. What Wei
points out does, for the most part, exist in the poem, but a poem can be
Fascist only in a contemplative sense, not in the sense of positively being
"fascist" or "non-fascist." The recent left-right quarrel on this list is
relevant because it is a quarrel over what we *do* with Pound. I take Pound's
equation of Jefferson - Mussolini seriously, because I think fascism is only a
condensation of the tyranny of capitalist democracy. Hence I do not see the
role of Mussolini in the poem as "ugly" -- it is part of the poem's beauty and
power.

Carrol