David,
This is an interesting remark that you've brought to our attention, which
can help us to understand Pound's methods. Pound's Cantos bring together
these two courses: his art makes absolute statements using exempla of the
'proportionally good' action. The important idea here is _proportional_.
Thus, when one encounters among Pound's exemplars individuals who have taken
drastic action, a fair question to ask is, What did Pound see as the
proportional badness, historical or contemporary, that might have warranted
such extreme measures? The wartime broadcasts and his other prose works shed
light on the badness of these times, as Pound perceived it, and, in turn,
illuminate the _proportional_ goodness of the exemplars whose actions are
exalted in the Cantos. For that reason, I would assert that his broadcasts
and prose writings are integral to an understanding of the exemplars in the
Cantos. I do agree in a qualified sense with your view that his
propagandizing and counter-propagandizing "unmake his own making". What his
wartime polemics have unmade is his reception, his place in the canon.
Tim Romano


----- Original Message -----
From: "A. David Moody" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, June 30, 2000 1:55 PM
Subject: art/action


> Tim Romano,
>
> You moved the discussion on a step (beyond 'Censorship & Social
Darwinism')
> by observing that 'Pound was both an idea-into-action and an
> action-into-idea artist'.   Yes, but we need a distinction here:  the
poet's
> business is to make his poem,  and it is the poem which goes into action.
> (One could say: the poet's job is to create the 'idea', and it is the
'idea'
> which goes into action--but 'idea' is easily mistaken to mean its mere
> abstract, so I prefer to say it is his making which goes into action.)  It
> acts, necessarily, in and upon the minds of its readers;  its results,
> naturally, will be slow to show up and must change perceptions before they
> can affect public policy.  But when the poet would go into action
directly,
> as Pound did in his prose propaganda, he is not acting as poet.  And he
can
> act contrary to his poetry, as Pound did in the worst of his Rome radio
> broadcasts.  That is, he can unmake his own making.  One man in opposite
> modes.  Yet the same motivation behind both.  It is a good puzzle to
bemuse
> the fixities and definites by which Pound is too readily judged.
>
> There is a note among Pound's papers in the Yale Beinecke Pound Archive in
> which he makes the distinction between 'the two sane courses worth
> attention'  'for a thinking man not a scientist':  'Art which is search
for
> an absolute statement, just as absolute as .... a conclusion of Euclid';
> and 'action, say political or economic action .... the goodness or badness
> lying in proportion to what is possible in particular given conditions'.
> [Taken from "Ezra Pound and Europe", ed. Richard Taylor and Claus
Melchior,
> (Rodopi, 1993) p.89]
>
> This doesn't in the least question your fully warranted statement that
Pound
> was an 'engaged' poet.  His own phrase for it was 'volitional', having a
> clear aim.  The poem has its aim, its politics and all, but its way of
going
> into action is not that of political activism.
>
> And let's repeat, what several contributors have been maintaining, the
> politics of the poetry are one thing, and Pound's prose propaganda is
> something else.   To confuse the one with the other serves obfuscation,
not
> the better understanding of either.
>
> Many thanks for your contributions to the list.
>
> David Moody
>
>