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- Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Fri, 8 Sep 2000 19:06:37 +0000
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Michael Springate <[log in to unmask]>
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Charles:

I am grateful for your thoughts.

I was, I admit, taken aback by what you said. And yet, perhaps for the first
time, I do feel you put me "inside your position".

This empathy (for those caught in insanity of the age, this nadir  of
darkness), this suspension of judgement due to overwhelming circumstance...

it is attractive, as if humanist values are re-established by the suspension of
the political...

(I apologise to Bob for positing essential values as the recreation of
humanism, which I assume [correctly?] he would equate with boojwa
something-or-other)

as if, Charles, although we can not avoid the rhetorical (both in Pound and
ourselves), we can... what, move beyond it to...  to...

Prometheus, was it, on the cliff face, his organs open to the hunger of the
birds??  and  Prometheus, wasn't it, the only one who knew how Zeus could save
himself and the other gods??

I am not facile here, Charles, (nor am I trying to be) this way of
understanding does not come easily to me.

Again, I thank you.


Michael



charles moyer wrote:

> Michael, you ask Bob if there is a "logical culmination of romanticism? I
> would answer, yes. It is called for the poet death at a very young and
> tender age, the Chatterton syndrome, a feat which Pound failed to
> accomplish.
>    Less facetiously, Michael, you are on to something by pegging Pound as
> the failed romantic, not because he didn't put forth a sterling effort in
> overcoming his American inferiority complex with a bloated ego in the
> presence of the haut cultur
> de Europena but largely because he lived in a destitute time, in fact the
> deepest midnight of the destitute night of the Kali Yuga. Bob was getting at
> this it in his last posting.  So
> re-interpretation of Pound outside this "romantic" attempt to bring
> Dionysus up out of the Grund to where he once lead, thyrsus in hand,
>  the seasonal water- freeing dance of renewal is simply irrelevant
> to anything of importance to Pound or his times. We only hope to see as
> Heidegger did that in this age of ours, "In the age of the world's night,
> the abyss of the world must be experienced and endured." And Pound did
> experience and endure two world wars, incarceration in an open monkey
> cage, and the government's official nut-house. Furthermore, Heidegger adds,
> "Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the
> trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods' tracks, and so trace for
> their kindred mortals the way toward the turning."
>     To those many individuals who have no vision of anything he must then
> appear as absolutely a nut-case whether he is conjuring up Athena's wisdom
> or Confucius's "heavenly order" for these things mean nothing to those
> folks and their age and won't until there is a turn from the darkness. The
> political choices of the 1930's and 1940's  were largely a choice between
> one feuilletonistic slogan over another. To keep the discussion on this
> political level is to continue to skim the surface of Pound and poetry in
> the 20th. Cent. and to continue stating the obvious which will continue to
> elicit the same remark over again- SO WHAT?
>     Pound's destiny as a poet was to attempt to turn on the lights of
> divine radience so the gods would once again take up an abode in
> everything. He may still prove to have been a significant contributor to
> this effort, but we are no where near out of this age, an age that devours
> everything in its darkness including its own criticism.
>
> CDM

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