Perhaps the point is that abducting Dionysus can't work, and that
prohibition (as an adbuction of the God for some exchange, as Pound
might see a number of matters of contemporary public policy) would be a
failure to recognize the deep roots of wine-must in matters of which the
modern world has lost its comprehension. So many of the positive points
isolated in Pound's methods exist in a kind of contrast to their absence in
the material processes of social reality that it has often seemed to me that
the Cantos are all about current events, or current non-eventfulness. The
cantos so resist summary that its hard to think that the second Canto is
about prohibition, but it is interesting to think that the abduction of
Dionysus might be thought to have a contextual resonance.

Date sent:              Sun, 12 Oct 2003 15:03:34 -0500
Send reply to:          - Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
From:                   Jonathan Weidler <[log in to unmask]>
Subject:                Re: Canto II & Prohibition
To:                     [log in to unmask]

Daniel, Carroll, et al.  --

I see your points about alluding to current events, but that doesn't
explain Pounds' reticence at all:  when he wasn't alluding to current
events (whether through social credit or through fascism) he was
alluding to the current events of past times (such as different banks'
foundings, the careers of different statesmen, the contents of
mail-bags, etc.)  He was certainly more of a topical poet than, say,
Eliot, though no less oblique for being so interested in the motion of
political tides.  Whitman, as a handy counter-example, also wrote of
current events with a representative mania, and an argument could
quickly be made that Pound's project was an extension and a critique of
Whitman's.  I think we'll need a more sophisticated tool to divide the
"best" from the not-so-best poets than their uses of current events
(whatever those might be).  (And I don't think that identifying value
is really what I'm interested in pursuing.  I take it for granted that
Pound is one of the best, for whatever reason, reasons that I know
change a lot from reader to reader.)

It is often the complaint of Marxist critics (esp. Lukacs) that
Modernism failed to develop the kind of historical consciousness to
represent the material processes of social reality.  I think that
they're right in a sense: certainly Pound's representations were often
deflected into less immediately typical, more temporally remote
historical figures (Malatesta instead of Harry Anslinger, Adams instead
of Hoover, Kung instead of Al Capone, etc.)  But this presents a
picture of the modernist avant-garde  as in flight from their moment,
into the antique past, without adequately expressing how that flight to
the past was itself a properly (or peculiarly) modern response, made in
the face of unique social challenges, and not necessarily a type of
retreat.  This is partially what I'm trying to understand through this
Prohibition reading of Canto II; I would like to approach the poem's
response to its contexts by understanding how its Dionysian mythologies
had (and have) contemporary functions.  (By the way, having reread the
poem, I don't see much evidence of Kenner's oblique reading.
Grape-leaves scuppering the oar-locks are about as close as I get to
images of intoxication.  The preponderance of liquids in the Canto
along with the Dionysian metamorphosis that is its subject seem to be
likely entry points, but I don't see how Kenner develops enough from
this to assert the reading he does.)

All discussion is welcome --
Jon

On Sunday, October 12, 2003, at 01:34  PM, Daniel Pearlman wrote:

> I'd guess that the best poets don't concern themselves much with
> alluding to current events in their poetry.
> ==Dan
>
> At 01:15 PM 10/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
>> Dear friends --
>>
>> I last night ran across a claim (authored by Hugh Kenner) that Canto
>> II
>> is an "oblique protest against the Prohibition amendment".  ...
>>
>> It does seem strange that such a socially sweeping legislative act
>> should not find fuller representation in the verse of Modernist poets,
>> Go Cubs!
>> Jon Weidler (in Chicago)
>
Von Underwood
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