In Mauberley,  the rampant mercantilism of the 20th c has turned the old
matrix, the foundation of classical western thought --

Apollonian/sky-sun-dry/reason-order-measure-permanence
vs
Dionysian/earth-vine-wet/irrationality-chaos-flowing-mutability.

upside down: all things are a flowing ... but a tawdry cheapness shall
outlast our days. 'Tawdry cheapness' in the stead of the Apollonian. To
kalon is decreed in the marketplace.  And upon this classical template is
overlaid the Masculine/Feminine opposition, the mythic orientation of much
medieval European romance and knight errantry, to which Pound alludes in an
appropriately crass and ugly manner: 'for an old bitch gone in the teeth'.

So neither the classical nor the romantic survives. The western ying/yang
is replaced by the cheap thing.

Tim Romano

At 12:26 AM 10/14/03, charles moyer wrote:
>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.
>
>
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