True from one vantage, but then again, there is another way of making sense of a thing, an object, an idea--as something which contains its own laws unto itself. If in a world of fractals we can extrapolate an entire universe from the part, it is also true that the part can stand alone, can have a self supporting value on its own. That value may be different than the one it holds in context, but it is there. Pound certainly seems to go back and forth on this issue--wanting context, wanting singularity. I suppose both ways have their strengths and their weaknesses.  
    And out of context, those lyrical passages Nassar identifies do tell a story--a story about how Pound was attempting to imagine a kind of hybrid human/other world. His elevated paradisal imagery.
 
>>> Daniel Pearlman <[log in to unmask]> 08/27 10:07 AM >>>
I don't think that anyone really ever judges, or can judge, ideas
one at a time.  Ideas are interlinked into systems which support
them--or fail to, as the case may be.  Pound says (somewhere in the
late Cantos), "Look to the source," or words to that effect--meaning
check out WHO is telling you something, not just the something you're
getting told: and that means, in support of what I've said above,
the individual idea exists in a more or less vulnerable moral/
political/logical context and is not separable from it.
 
I am reminded of a book on the Cantos written by a guy named
Nasser (Nassar?) who thought he could do a salvaging operation
by rescuing the few lyrical passages from the 95% dreck he
regarded the rest of the poem to be.  Well, that's an example
of looking at the parts in disregard of the whole, but the
problem was that those lyrical parts were, and are, largely
incomprehensible out of context.
 
==Dan
 
At 08:28 AM 8/27/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Pound said, "Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a
time."   (or something pretty close to that).
>Tim Romano
>
>Robert Kibler wrote:
>
>> [...]
>> What did Pound say--he wished that his work would be examined in its
parts, and not taken and > judged at once, as a whole.
>> [...]
>
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