----------
>From: Peter Montgomery <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Re: atomic troll
>Date: Mon, Nov 15, 2004, 9:14 PM
>

> 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