Daniel Pearlman wrote:

> Carrol,
>
> How can you generalize and say, "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"?

At one point in PL the narrator comes close to saying that if his poem is not
literally true -- that is, if he has not succeeded in forcing the Holy Spirit to
speak through him -- then he may well be damned.
And cf. EP's I am no Demi-god with "Here the high imagination failed." Gibbon, who
can be regarded as an epic poet, seems to imagine that he too can make the dead
speak through his 18th c. voice. Pound the person may or may not have been feeling
humility when he wrote that line -- but if one let's the poem speak through it is
only, like Dante's line, a 'confession' that even the greatest extension of human
power (i.e., the poet's) can't show *everything*.

Carrol

P.S. Tim inquires about "light fighting for speed." I'm depending on memory rather
than consulting the text, but I think that phrase appears somewhere in *Thrones*.
As Tim recalls, I did inquire about Manichaeans a while back -- and from the
earliest Cantos there is an endlessly repeated "action" of clarity/light
disengaging itself from clutter, as in the line that obsessed Blackmur, "In the
gloom the gold gathers the light against it." (Incidentally, I quoted the line on
wheat wrongly. It is in Canto 106 and reads

                    for the gold light of wheat surging upward
                                                                    ungathered
                    Persephone in the cotton-field
                            granite next sea wave
                    is for clarity
                            deep waters reflecting all fire

P.S. 2. "Decency" and "Decorum" -- decent from L. decens, pres. part. of decere,
to be fitting, suit.
Roy Pearce in *Historicism Once More* (I'm working from memory of the title) in an
essay on Barlow, Whitman, and Pound suggests that Pound believed that an absolute
decorum maintained by force of will could replace plot. (That's a paraphrase from
memory -- don't trust it.) Canto 81 seems almost to be a sort of summarizing
Canto. One could hypthetically imagine the Cantos as ending with the line
                                all in the diffidence that faltered . . .
Regardless of what one thinks of its politics or its anti-materialist metaphysics,
the poem is a fantastic exercise of the will which seems to merit the epithet
"heroic."