Tim Romano
September 04, 2000 12:19 AM

> Bob,
> Interesting challenges. Granted, the modernists were interested in the
> individual;  I won't concede that this interest in the self as lens was a
> "blight".  The_ego scriptor_ of the Pisan Cantos saw himself in the great
> tradition of 'merkan egoism' . He believed in luminaries.

yes indeed...almost seems, even the pisan cantos notwithstanding,
he never got beyond this humbug structure of traditional adolescent
pedagogy...his parson weems jefferson & co
...nor, the concommitant fantasy-self.
certainly self qua lens is unexceptionable,  but don't it
seem finally with ep that the real subject of his art is the fetishized
bohemian-troubador-aesthete-seer-prophet personna(e) self itself
...the cantos being suffuse with private lang & form/elipses
compell access/exegesis biograph-ologically, no?
...like...they aim to discover himself the god of his own gnostic gospel?


>
> "Negative capability" and "directed will" are divergent paths.

not sure exactly what you got in mind with "directed will" (ep's coinage ?)
...but, pretty sure i'd concur...cantos, finally, a prodigous act of will,
tour de force...very impressive ...but,  no "to a nightengale"


 Keats sought
> a quietness of being.  Pound celebrated the noise of doing.  Beauty for
> Keats consisted in sublime Arrest; beauty, for Pound, was to be found in
> mundane Function and in the aptness of the design.

...emphatically, but only qua miniaturist, no?
for all the great show of erudition, there is a poverty
of world (heidegger) here, self & mind sufficient to engender a grande
poetic synthesis such as he attempts with his ulysses (cantos),
in contrast to joyce's.

thanks, tim.
yours,
bob