I have often suspected that Pound did not really mean to denigrate Nietzsche
by his line in "Mauberley"- "Mildness, amid the neo-Nietzschean clatter",
and had actually plied that philosopher's thesis in "The Birth of Tragedy"
into his poem with more critical acumen. The poem mentions both Dionysus and
Apollo, and why should the apathein mentioned here be of the serious
"Olympian" sort? Perhaps he was getting at something less about the feminine
and the masculine but more about order and chaos.

Charles

----------
>From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: Canto II & Prohibition
>Date: Mon, Oct 13, 2003, 3:50 PM
>

> The heroic "virile" Christ of the "Ballad" and Bacchus belong to the same
> vortex. Like his friend Wyndham Lewis, Pound would have seen the womens
> temperance movement as being all mixed up with the Christers in the same
> feminizing vortex, threatening the prerogatives of the adult male will:
> take away booze and replace it with family worship and men will be tame
> husbands and more reliable worker-bees. With the wild bacchanal, Pound
> opposes that feminizing vortex from without; he  counters it from within in
> the figure of the virile Christ of the "Ballad" -- a heroic role model for
> the paterfamilias.  The Virile Christ : Bacchus :: Popeye : Brutus. Alas,
> poor Wimpy. He shattered the nape nerve.
>   Tim Romano
>
> At 04:41 PM 10/12/03, Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>>I wonder if Canto 2's Bacchus comes more out of Pound's vision of a virile
>>Christ,
>>as in "Ballad of the Goodly Fere," rather than in response to Prohibition.