Regarding the absence of Christ from the Cantos, recall:

Christ follows Dionysus,
Phallic and ambrosial
Made way for macerations...

Tim Romano

----- Original Message -----
From: "Burt Hatlen" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, June 11, 2000 7:42 PM
Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: EP & Religion


> [log in to unmask],.Internet writes:
> >>Robert Duncan said that Pound was  "pagan fundamentalist."
> >Where did Duncan say this. I would be very grateful if Burt Hatlen could
> >supply the reference.
> >Stephen Wilson.
>
>
> Here's the full quotation:
>
> "Pound derives from the Neoplatonic cult of Helios, from the Provencal
> cult of Amor, from the Renaissance revival of pagan mysteries after
> Gemistos Plethon, and from the immediate influence of the theosophical
> revival in which Yeats was immersed, an analogous tradition of poetry
> as a vehicle for heterodox belief, a ground in which the divine world
> may appear (with the exception of the Judeo-Christian orders). At the
> thought of Jesus, Pound has all the furious fanaticism of the Emperor
> Julian; he is a pagan fundamentalist. Aphrodite may appear to the poet,
> and even Kuanon, but not Mary; Helios and even Ra-Set may come into the
> poem, but not Christ. Yet these gods of the old world are not only
> illustrations of a living tradition; they are, Pound testifies
> throughout The Cantos, presences of a living experience. Does the poet
> cast them as images upon our minds or do they use the medium of the
> poem to present themselves?  They come to the poet as he calls them up.
> So, in the first draft of Canto I: 'Gods float in the azure air . . .'
>                 'It is not gone,' Metastasio
>                 Is right, we have that world about us."
>
(II.5: 340)
>
> The citation refers to Part II, Chapter 5 of The H.D. Book. Published
> in fragments during Duncan's lifetime,  The H.D. Book, one of our
> century's central works of poetic theory, is still not available as a
> book, although the University of California Press is supposedly
> committed to publishing it. The quotation comes from a section of Part
> II, Chapter 5, that was published in the journal Stony Brook 3/4 (Fall
> 1969), pp. 336-347.
>
> The quoted passage, by the way, also raises what seems to me the
> central issue about Pound's "religion." Did he subscribe to a set of
> "religious beliefs," pagan or otherwise, that stand apart from and
> prior to the poem?  Or is THE POEM ITSELF the locus of religious
> experience, for him? Duncan suggests the later.  The poet as theurge,
> and the poem itself as the place where the gods show themselves. Now
> that's an idea that really does challenge our assumptions about
> religion and poetry and the relationship between the two.
>
> Syrette and Tryphonopoulos have, of course, been moving toward a
> "Duncanesque" view of Pound, with their theory that he belongs within
> the history of the "occult."  But Surette at least shows no interest in
> Pound's poetry, casting the issue entirely as a question of Pound's
> presumed beliefs, within the context of 19th and 20th century
> intellectual history. (Indeed, Surette says as much in The Birth of
> Modernism: "The rationale of this study is much closer to the old
> method of the history of ideas" (5).)And as long as we try to read
> Pound as primarily a "thinker," we will, I think, miss the point. The
> poet is a maker, and we need to be talking about what he MADE, not
> about what he may or may not have "thought."
>
> Burt Hatlen
>
>