Carrol,

How can you generalize and say, "Humility does not become the epic
(or would-be epic) poet, and it is unrealistic I think for the reader
to expect such in the epic voice"?  In the post-classical epic, why
can't humility be regarded as a virtue of the (Christian) hero?

==Dan

At 11:01 AM 8/18/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>
>> Jacob,
>>
>> On second thought, your equation of Pound/scriptor and Pound/Centaur
>> raises a problem of self-contradiction.  The lone ant
>> who survives the ruins of Europe is a very humbled Pound whose
>> vanity has already been pulled down by history.
>
>Humility does not become the epic (or would-be epic) poet, and it is
>unrealistic I think for the reader to expect such in the epic voice. And the
>whole of Canto 81 seems to involve expansion after expansion of "To have
>gathered from the air a live tradition / ... / This is not vanity." (Does not
>some Canto contain an allusion to or quoting of Horace's -- or Yeats's or
both?
>-- "I have made it from a mouthful of air"?) And some weight should be
given to
>the fact that the last name in the Canto is that of the minor poet Blunt,
with
>Pound boasting of having visited him. And the "Fragment (1966)"
>
>                                That her acts
>                                        Olga's acts
>                                                    of beauty
>                                        be remembered.
>
>has still (rightly I think) the arrogance of Ovid's claim to be remembered
>wherever Latin is read -- and of Shakespeare's boast in the sonnets of the
>power to give immortality.
>
>Moreover. Susanne Langer observed that there are no negatives in poetry --
they
>serve only to bring before the reader the 'thing' negated. And Sidney had
>already observed four hundred years ago that there are no positives in poetry
>(The poet never lieth because the poet never affirmeth.) Thus the line
(quoted
>from memory),
>                The gold light of wheat surging upward, ungathered
>would be equally powerful whether we decided (as appears to be the case)
it is
>here a positive or we decided from some context that it was a negative. Pound
>puts the thing (sometimes, in the Platonic tradition, very abstract or
complex
>'things,' like a whole complex of u.s. history viewed from a certain
>perspective) before the reader's eyes; the reader not the poet decides what
>he/she will do with it.
>
>This is part of my objection both to Wei and to those who attack him. What
Wei
>points out does, for the most part, exist in the poem, but a poem can be
>Fascist only in a contemplative sense, not in the sense of positively being
>"fascist" or "non-fascist." The recent left-right quarrel on this list is
>relevant because it is a quarrel over what we *do* with Pound. I take Pound's
>equation of Jefferson - Mussolini seriously, because I think fascism is
only a
>condensation of the tyranny of capitalist democracy. Hence I do not see the
>role of Mussolini in the poem as "ugly" -- it is part of the poem's beauty
and
>power.
>
>Carrol
>
HOME:
Dan Pearlman
102 Blackstone Blvd. #5
Providence, RI 02906
Tel.: 401 453-3027
email: [log in to unmask]
Fax: (253) 681-8518
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/clf/

OFFICE
Department of English
University of Rhode Island
Kingston, RI 02881
Tel.: 401 874-4659