There has been some talk about 'high' art lately...was wondering what the
general view is on 'high' versus 'low'? Are such positions that clearly
defined? I'm unsure that there really is a facing off here.Versus, in the
latin, is 'a turning'. I take it as not so much boustrophedon, as a plough
turns, but rather cyclic, i.e. as Yeats might put it: sun and moon. Of
course, this just may be an ideal way of thinking. Holistic. When I approach
Pound, I don't view him as an elitist (or whatever 'high art' sign one would
hang), rather as one who strove to create an organ of nature, a complex of
movements. From the very end of the Cantos, from his Drafts & Fragments:
"That I lost my center / fighting the world. / The dreams clash / and are
shattered--/ and that I tried to make a paradiso/ terrestre". Would not Pound
himself be the 'center', so to speak, heaven and earth revolving around him?
His language use, throughout the Cantos specifically, tends to resonate, as
an ideogram might, with a particular gravity and weight in their
combinations. Even if the intellectual meaning is not found, the charging of
words comes through, i.e. the reader moves through a darkness, needing only
to 'feel-out' their way. This, it seems, is one of the greatest powers of the
poem, forcing one to use other reliable sensibilities. Of course, a Virgil of
some sort does help. Anyway, figured to post the question.
 
My Best,
CB