The heroic "virile" Christ of the "Ballad" and Bacchus belong to the same
vortex. Like his friend Wyndham Lewis, Pound would have seen the womens
temperance movement as being all mixed up with the Christers in the same
feminizing vortex, threatening the prerogatives of the adult male will:
take away booze and replace it with family worship and men will be tame
husbands and more reliable worker-bees. With the wild bacchanal, Pound
opposes that feminizing vortex from without; he  counters it from within in
the figure of the virile Christ of the "Ballad" -- a heroic role model for
the paterfamilias.  The Virile Christ : Bacchus :: Popeye : Brutus. Alas,
poor Wimpy. He shattered the nape nerve.
  Tim Romano

At 04:41 PM 10/12/03, Daniel Pearlman wrote:
>I wonder if Canto 2's Bacchus comes more out of Pound's vision of a virile
>Christ,
>as in "Ballad of the Goodly Fere," rather than in response to Prohibition.