Nicht, mine herr.
You will never crack the four walls that way to
reduce and self-delusively improve on McLuhan's
LAWS OF THE MEDIA to show how Roger-doger advanced
beyond him you are. The five parts of rhetoric are
an entirely different phenom. which will continue
to hold you at bay, a counter troll, so to squeak,
to whisk away your android mom.

Fee,fie,foo,fum, methinks I smell a Canadium.

In the mean time, I think we have provided the list
with some valuable points of view on an important
Eliot/Pound question.

You need to read the last few lines of John Dryden's
Macflecnoe to discover whose mantel you really think you
are wearing the theall and end all.

This is the way the atomic troll goes, not with pop but a poof.

Barfs to you.
Peter
Troll catcher.
-----Original Message-----
From: Chapman
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 2004-Nov-15 6:40 AM
Subject: atomic troll

Peter,

Bush looks at the Athenaeum review to support his guess about the advice
Eliot is said to have offered for the Ur-Cantos. He discusses the Bay
Street
Hymn Book, the object revealing the 'master-plan' of Pound and Eliot to
advance their poetic modernism, fact and history being of immediate
concern
due to their responses to Joyce's 'Telemachus' chapter and hence the
prearranged focus for 'Three Cantos' and 'Gerontion.'

Doesn't Gerontion mean 'little old man?'

Thanks for the other info. Just to be clear, McLuhan's thesis was that
Eliot
operated with a four part structure,
"literal/analogical/allegorical/anagogical", Pound's fifth was drama?

cheers,
Chris.


-----Original Message-----
From: - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of Peter Montgomery
Sent: Monday, November 15, 2004 3:51 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: trolling


From: Chapman

I am curious about your interest in Pound's dramatic sensibility. I have
been thinking about his relationship to Browning, the Ur- cantos and the
various stories of influence. Ronald Bush describes a delicate moment in
the advent of the Ur-Cantos where Pound is thought to hear Eliot's
advice
concerning the presence of Pound's personality in that poem. Eliot is
thought, in abt. 1919, just prior to the Ur-Cantos revision from their
1915 'Poetry' incarnation into that year's 'Quia Pauper Amavi' state, to
counsel Pound to excise a 'redundant' passage of quibbling with Browning
in
their private, Sordell-ian 'brother's speech.'
=====================================

As to Pound's sense of drama,I must demure. My understanding
of the Eliot side of the Pound/Eliot tussle is a bit more
secure. For the Pound side I am very dependent on a paper
given by my mentor, Marshall McLuhan, as the 4th Annual Pound
Lecture in the Humanities at 7:30 pm on April 25, 1978 at the
University of Idaho. It seems a somewhat definitive piece to me.
Basically McLuhan, whose Phd from Cambridge was on Nash/Education,
identified Pound as having a commitment to the 5 part structure of
rhetoric.
Eliot under the influence of Dante and Lancelot Andrewes
would seem to be much more a four part man, given the four levels
of exegesis (differently name, sometimes as literal/analogical/
allegoriacl/anagogical). If Pound was a rhetorician, then he had
a sense of the drama of a rhetorical presentation

That is a VERY crude summary of McLuhan's thesis.
I'm just not qualified to comment further on Pound.
Ten years of graduate committment to Eliot more-or-less
blotted P. out of my mind.

All that having been said, I think I can, without violating
McLuhan's copyright (for which I explicitly -from his estate- do not
have permission), present you with three relevant quotes from Eliot,
made
by McLuhan, and in this order, which speak reasonably closely to your
point:

from AFTER STRANGE GODS (Faber, 1934, 41-42):

But Confucius has become the philosopher of the rebellious Protestant.
And I
cannot but feel that in some respects Irving Babbitt, with the noblest
intentions, has merely made matters worse instead of better.
The name of Irving Babbitt instantly suggests that of Ezra Pound (his
peer
in cosmopolitanism) and that of I.A. Richards: it would seem that
Confucius
is the spiritual adviser of the highly educated and fastidious, in
contrast
to the dark gods of Mexico. Mr. Pound presents the closest counterpart
to
Irving Babbitt. Extremely quick-witted and very learned, he is attracted
to
the Middle Ages, apparently, by everything except that which gives them
their significance. His powerful and narrow post-Protestant prejudice
peeps
out from the most unexpected places: one can hardly read the erudite
notes
and commentary to his edition of Guido Cavalcanti without suspecting
that he
finds Guido much more sympathetic than Dante, and on grounds which have
little to do with their respective merits as poets: namely, that Guido
was
very likely a heretic, if not a sceptic - as evidenced partly by his
possibly having held some pneumatic philosophy and theory of corpuscular
action which I am unable to understand. Mr. Pound, like Babbitt, is an
individualist, and still more a libertarian.

==========

If that raises your criticial hackles, you can bet it did Pound's
and it is refected in the vollies they exchanged for sometime on
in NEW after the volume came out.
=======================

The next, which McLuhan described as a theory of communication
which the two poets shard, and perhaps an assuager if you didn't like
the former, is from a review of QUIA PAUPER AMAVI "The Method of Mr.
Pound" in THE ATHENEUM (Oct 24/1919: 1065):

The historical method is, of course, the one which suits Mr. Pound's
temperament; it is also a conscious and consistent application of a
procedure suggested by Browning, which Mr. Pound applies more
consciously
and consistently than Browning did. Most poets grasp their own time, the
life of the world as it stirs before their eyes, at one convulsion or
not at
all. But they have no method for closing in upon it. Mr. Pound proceeds
by
acquiring the entire past; and when the entire past is acquired, the
constituents fall into place and the present is revealed. Such a method
involves immense capacities of learning and of dominating one's
learning,
and the peculiarity of expressing oneself through historical masks. Mr.
Pound has a unique gift for expression through some phase of past life.
This
is not archaeology or pedantry, but one method, and a very high method,
of
poetry. It is a method which allows of no arrest, for the poet imposes
upon
himself, necessarily, the condition of continually changing his mask;
hic et
ubique, then we'll shift our ground.

======================
The last is from Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets" SELECTED ESSAYS
(Faber 1932:289). McLuhan saw this as a follow on from the previous:

It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in
philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears
likely
that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
difficult.
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this
variety
and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various
and
complex results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more
allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary,
language into his meaning.

=======================================

You might wish to put your question about Eliot's quibble
over the Ur Canto to the Eliot list. It is not one into
which I have run.

As to the dogmatic Trad. & In. Tal, reflective of the boldness
of early years, while I agree with the principle of depersonal-
isation in general, there are so many place in Eliot's own work
where it might be said to be violated, and that includes TWL,
that I think it is a mistake to see it as completely exclusive
of personal inrerventions. The "I" voice in "The Fire Sermon"
is primarily universal, but given that it was written against
the background of Eliot's own breakdown, apparently conditioned
by his marriage to his supposedly neurotic muse, Vivien( or ne),
one could read the emotion in it as autobiographical.

On the other hand, I think the theory of time ventured in the same essay
is right on the mark, and any critic ignores it to his peril
as the cliche goes.

Hope that helps,
Peter