Your objections are well taken, Leon, but I opened myself to them
unnecessarily, I think.  I agree entirely with the usefulness of
including the wider context in the consideration of a specific
passage--whether the context of the whole Canto, all of the Cantos,
all of EP's poetry, prose, published or unpublished, etc.  And in
many cases within Pound's works there are images at considerable
distance from each other which obviously have the same, almost
allegorical, value--like Zagreus, lynx, and are
intentional echoes.  Where similar images found elsewhere in an
oeuvre are NOT identifiable echoes, however, the connections among
them are bound to be dubious.  My methodological suggestion, which
I don't see as particularly New Critical, is first to examine
exhaustively the passage in question--hopefully to limit the range
of possible meanings of a difficult line or image--and then, when
this method fails, to hope for enlightenment elsewhere.  I don't
know if anyone will remember, but way back when, I was racking
my brain to understand the Pisan line "When Lucifer fell in N.
Carolina," a line which the immediate context did NOT help with,
and it was only my chance meeting with La Martinelli that led me
to discover the exact source in a magazine article Pound read in
the toilet at Pisa.  So, while it all boils down to a matter of
judgment, one ought to follow critical guidelines in order to
come up with as convincing a judgment as possible.

==Dan

At 10:07 AM 8/28/00 -0400, you wrote:
>Thanks, Dan, for your flattering remarks on my posting. However, I do not
>accept your New Critical criteria which restrict interpretation to an
>immediate context of a dozen or so lines. Even on New Critical principles, a
>single poem--even a very long one--surely qualifies in its entirely as a
>pertinent context.
>    But my disagreement with New Criticism goes far beyond that. I think
>that anything Pound wrote or is reporting as having said is pertinent to the
>interpretive enterprise. In short, I operate on the principles of German
>hermeneutics as opposed to New Critical ones. Of course, various caveats
>have to be observed--notably that poets, like other human beings, change
>their minds, and their attitudes. Also, like other human beings, they are
>not omniscient or incapable of error. They may mispeak themselves, and we
>cannot assume that when they employ a word that they have the entire entry
>in the OED in mind.
>    Anyone alert to critical principles will notice, that I assume in the
>foregoing that the relevant meaning is what some folks call "author's
>meaning." However, my imnpression is almost everyone posting to this list
>accepts that unfashionable critical principle. On deconstructive principles,
>the meaning is whatever Pound's time, class, race, gender, etc. etc. would
>have said according to the commentator's understanding or what such an
>postulated individual would have said. Disagreements on those grounds are
>about who is best qualified to say which class of individual should be
>postulated, and that usually comes down to an appeal to authority--either
>Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze or some other Frenchman.
>
>All the best,
>Leon Surette
>English Dept.
>University of Western Ontario
>London, Ont.
>N6A 3K7
>
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