Carrol,
In Sidney's aesthetic, the poem's engine revs; in Pound's, the engine revs
and the clutch is engaged.  Pound regards the goal of his work to help the
reader "get wise"...to instruct and delight, if you will.  Isn't Sidney's
aesthetic philosophy incompatible with Pound's insoftar as Pound would the
word go into action?

In the chapter entitled ZWECK or the AIM in Guide to Kulchur, Pound writes:

    The value of Leo Frobenius to civilization is not for the
rightness or wrongness of this opinion or that opinion but
for the kind of thinking he does...
    He has in especial seen and marked out a kind of
knowing, the difference between knowledge that has to be
acquired by particular effort and knowing that is in people,
"in the air". He has accented the value of such record.
HIS ARCHEOLOGY IS NOT RETROSPECTIVE, IT IS IMMEDIATE
    Example: the peasants opposed a railway cutting. A
king had driven into the ground at that place. The
engineers dug and unearthed the bronze car of Dis, two
thousand years buried.
    It wd. be unjust to Frazer to say that his work was
_merely_ retrospective. But there is a quite different phase
in the work of Frobenius.
    "Where we found these rock drawings, there was
always water within six feet of the surface." That kind
of research goes not only into past and forgotten life,
but points to tomorrow's water supply.
    THIS IS NOT _MERE_ UTILITARIANISM, IT IS A DOUBLE CHARGE, A
SENSE OF TWO SETS OF VALUES AND THEIR RELATION."

[upper case, my emphasis]

What Pound seems to be pointing out, in his examples of the approach taken
by Frobenius, is the relation between Art and Lore. Its embodiment of Lore
(of whatever kind, economic, spiritual, erotic...)  brings us back to the
question whether poetry "affirmeth" anything.  Lore-poetry does affirm. In
Pound, the affirmation, in its most abstract form, is of the _relations_
between things.  His ideogrammatic method says this:THERE IS A RELATION
between this thing and that.

Of course, no matter what the poet may affirm, no matter what his Zweck or
Aim, the reader ultimately decides how to take the words, or how not to take
them.

Tim Romano


> 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),