The Modern moment is an interesting one because it seems to be poised
on the sliding hinge between the past and the present.  One way to
define the postmodern is to see it as the moments after this hinge has
been surpassed, and the past is no longer felt as present, relevant, or
real.  That's why postmodernisms are distinguished by a turning away
from historicity and the elaboration of surfaces.  (For more on this,
see Fred Jameson's book.)

I would venture that Pound did not blow the horn for uniqueness, at
least not in a way that Emerson did, and that he is a better writer for
it.  The point of Canto IV, it seems to me, is that the same pattern of
energy that invests the story of the fall of Troy appears again, in
China, in Provence, in America, and that the stories we are drawn to
tell resemble one another, and repeat themselves through us.  So there
is a kind of identity, in other words, between the circumstances of the
past and the circumstances of the present: the modernizing world will
not, then, fulfill its hubris by becoming wholly new.  This seems to me
to explain why the past and its fragments are wrapped into Pound's
efforts to "make it new", not because he was clumsy or uninventive, or
because he failed to take his own advice, but because the leading edge
of historical time is the same, whether in Troy on the Mediterranean,
or Troy, NY.  In this way, I guess Pound was warning against taking the
superficial alterations implied by the modern too seriously: history,
and its dramatic junctures and ruptures, have not singled us out to be
special in some absolute fashion.  Pound considered (I would argue)
that renewing and revivifying present day poetic practice implied
accommodating the presentness of the past, as well as the lived present
he inhabited.  Make it new and make it old are the sides of the same
coin, and that's one of the paradoxical truths EP communicates.  The
new and the old (by which I mean the ancient, not the immediate, past
(more on this later)) are related dialectically, as concepts, and map
between them an identity that language (especially the language of
people self-consciously modernizing) tends to obscure, or even deny.

On the subject of Emerson, I just read his poem about being in the
Adirondacks, and I found it fascinating.  Has anyone else read it?
There's a wonderful moment where the speaker and his companions (all of
whom are intellectuals, natch, and who must be accompanied by guides to
paddle the canoes and keep them from getting lost) have their pastoral,
idyllic, natural-type reverie interrupted by news that the
transAtlantic cable has been completed.  Emerson goes on to talk about
the glories of sending the lightning to school, and of making it earn a
decent wage by being useful to us through the telegraph cable.  And so
the dialectic of enlightenment continues, and nature is made
instrumental through the power of our reason, and Emerson sees no
problem or contradiction with being a romantic naturalist and an
advocate of progressive technology.  Of course, we can hardly blame
him; he hadn't had the chance to see how persistently pernicious the
intrumentation of nature could eventually become, and how destructive
some of the consequences of progress would be.  (Or can we?)

There's a really good book called Orientalism, Modernism and the
American Poem by Robert Kern.  It draws a really convincing line from
Emerson through Fenellossa (did I spell that right?) to Pound, and even
beyond Pound to Gary Snyder.  Emerson never wrote about Chinese (or at
least wrote very little), but he did write about hieroglyphics, as did
many of his contemporaries.  The attraction of hieroglyphs for those
antebellum writers was very similar to EP's attraction to the Chinese
ideogram, in that the pictorial, verb-plus-noun concentration of those
signs seemed to present things in themselves.  Kern describes (quite
well, I think) how writers more and more desired a release from or
simplification of grammatical, alphabetic abstraction, and looked to
these "ancient" scripts for models.  Of course, famously, Pound did not
understand the Chinese he was advocating.  Instead, using the Imagist
tools he and his friends had been pursuing (originally employed simply
to escape moldy, ossified Victorian forms) EP found a way to represent
better the concision of a Chinese poem, and the all-at-onceness of
ideogrammatic writing.  Before Pound, we should remember, Chinese
poetry translated into English was often stripped of any hint of
Chinese-ness: a four-line, four-syllables-per-line stanza of Chinese
verse customarily became a fourteen line verse paragraph in English.
EP and others like him were interested in cutting off the fat of such
"translations", partially in order to invent a more appropriate
representation of Chinese  in English, but partially because it gave
his Imagist principles a veneer of deeper antiquity, and a tradition
older than English verse.  Once again, making it new implies for Pound
making it old.

So, concision is part of his aesthetic.  It was also part of his
literary programme, and a tool in his polemical toolbox.  It
represented more than one thing, and had just as much a
literary-political valence as it did an aesthetic valence.  "The
aesthetic" that people seem to yearn for (much as I long for a
grapefruit right now, something light and pleasant) frustrates them as
often as not, in that "the aesthetic" is no more isolatable a quality
of a text (or other object) than weight or color is isolatable from a
physical object.  It's lovely to think about the loveliness of lovely
things, even when the loveliness takes work to find, but there are many
other qualities of an artwork than just its beauty-function.

(I'm suddenly reminded of the military school that Homer & Marge are
considering for Bart, and the English class they visit: a cadet stands
at attention, and responds to the teacher's question with "Beauty is
truth, truth beauty, sir!"  To tip my hat a little to the Marxists that
trained me, truth and beauty, such attractive notions, mix to make one
hell of an ideological cocktail.  Caution: the surgeon general warns
that truth-and-beauty may impair your ability to operate heavy
machinery.  Drink responsibly.)

What's interesting to me is that the past that Pound used for his
word-hoard was most decidedly not the recent past.  The energy he found
so useful in that variety of antiquities he didn't seem to find in, say
(for Stoner's sake) Emerson.  No, no, not at all.  The Victorians
(including their American counterparts) did not take seriously the
negative side of modernization, and did what they could to absorb the
earlier revolts of Romanticism, "to ensure domestic tranquility".
Modern poets love to spite the Victorian matron, to make the widows
wince.  This might have just been generational resentment and distaste,
an urge to kill the parents and start fresh.  Funny how often that
happens.  It's as though ancestor worship demands really old ancestors;
the ones we have right nearby are no good at all, and must be stopped
from filling the world with doilies and Golden Book Anthologies of
Sweet Poesy for every Girl and Boy.  So, yeah.

That's all I have to say.  I promise I'll be more concise in the future.

Regards to all,
Jon