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Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
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From:
"Robert E. Kibler" <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Thu, 23 Jul 1998 15:03:48 -0400
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Robert E Kibler <[log in to unmask]>
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On Thu, 23 Jul 1998 13:43:36 -0400 wrote...
>
Right about the distinctions, and I also agree that the Cantos is not a Taoist
poem. I do think however that in order to create a paradiso terrestre, Pound
needed to subordinate all of that ordering and regulating to a disordering,
deregulating universe, and that he does accomplish this to some degree at the
end of his poem.  Pound was a work in progress, and one of the developments
that ocurred over time was his marked, if never abslute shift away from a
desire to see order as predominant in the universe, and in the world of man.
Giving up that dominating order--if he does so--is to make a turn, I think,
towards what may be seen as Taoist philosophy, no matter where he finds its
elements.  That he consistently condemned the Western Platonic traditions and
saw Eastern ones--if particularly Confucian ones--as the cure for Western ills
caused by Platonic traditions, suggests that he was particularly disposed to
Eastern thought.  He wanted to find his answers there, even if they also may
have been found in like form in the West.  That ought to lean us a little
towards favoring Taoism as a part of the changes that occurr in Pound's work,
over time.  And his sustained emaphasis on aesthetic movement of energy through
concrete images--Sappho has it, and Pound tries for it, but arguably none of
his Western models enacted that movement with the regularity found in the
Taoist poets Pound found in the Fenollosa notebooks.  He stayed away from the
sennin poems, or took the emphasis on other worldliness out of them, but he
wanted that movement.  His early Sapphic translations show the difference
between what he could see he wanted to poetry, and what he was able to bring to
form. But this changes, in stops and spurts--interrupted by his willed attempts
to create poetic expression ideogrammatically. Pound was not an avowed Taoist,
to be sure, but something of it is working in his verse.  Yes, elements, I
suppose, and certainly not part of a program. But something there.
 
Were you in China?
 
Robert E. Kibler
Department of English
University of Minnesota
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                fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis,
                Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.

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