Margaret has lit upon a most interesting passage.
My question: would Pound expect an image from an
essay of his to carry the same meaning in a Canto?
Would he expect Cantos readers to have both the
detailed reading knowledge of his non-Cantos work
AND such a great memory as to expect his ant-centaur
to be identified as poet?  To me, such references
have critical power, in aiding explication, when
they are reinforced within the text in question.
So far we have had your identification of poetry
as centaur and--is it a contradictory?--ID of the
centaur as brutal in Trachis.  How much of external
texts can we bring to bear on the passage at issue?

==Dan

At 01:56 PM 8/25/00 -0700, you wrote:
>To the listserv,
>Wonderful back and forth on the ant. I can't remember the previous
>listserv discussion on the subject, but was The Serious Artist brought
>into the dialogue? LE p 52 has "Poetry is a centaur. The thinking
>word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the
>energizing, sentient, musical faculties. It is precisely the difficulty
>of this amphibious existence that keeps down the census record of good
>poets."
>In this case, the ant is the poet in the dragon (military) world. Scaled
>invention, yes, but probably not meaning man is no better than an ant,
>and probably not looking at soldier ants.
>Also see Terrell's Vol. I, p 7 regarding Proteus, Aristophanes' frogs,
>and the mention of horse or goat hindquarters of poetry being the
>centaur.
>Pound/Zagreus in Hades has found the good poet in the ant.
>
>Best,
>Margaret
>
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