Martin raises an interesting question.
I can see what the early Pound would have thought
of audience-centered views of art reception. For EP,
audience is the manure from which the poet-flower arises;
the manure exists for the sake of the flower--a
one-way transaction only. But then to assume that
"A Pact" evinces Pound's radical change of attitude
toward that of the "poet of the people" a la Whitman
is to contradict his life-long "modernist" elitism,
a strong component of his sympathy for fascism,
as everyone by now appreciates.
I think rather that, in "A Pact," Pound declares an
affinity for the *vatic* role of the poet, the poet as
(Ezraic) prophet--one of the Whitmanian voices that
he found constitutionally more suitable than that of
the democratic Whitman, or the sexual Whitman that the
puritanical EP never quite comes to terms with [See
Canto 39, for example, in which Woman is still viewed
threateningly as some kind of biological chaos, another
sort of manure].
We can't infer from "A Pact" alone what accommodation
EP is making to his predecessor: we can only make
educated guesses based on EP's actual practice as
poet and thinker. That's the problem with "A Pact"
for a student with no background in EP or Whitman.
It's a very personal poem. It's as if EP is winking
at us and saying, well, if you know me, you'll know
what I'm talking about.
I'll bet the teacher who assigned this project couldn't
him/herself write 500 meaningful words on the poem!
==Dan P
At 10:29 PM 11/12/99 +0100, you wrote:
>Dear Cindy,
>
>EP's 1914 rejection of the Whitman-taken motto of the Harriet Monroe
>Magazine 'Poetry' looks like a clue to me.
>The motto was 'To have great poets there must be great audiences too'
>and Pound argued against this by saying that 'the artist is not
>dependent upon the multitude of the listeners. Humanity is the rich
>effluvium, it is the waste, the manure and the soil, and from it grows
>the tree of the arts...This rabble, this multitude - does not create
>the great artist. They are aimless and drifting without him.' (Poetry
>Oct 1914)
>
>The tree of the arts...
>
>'It was you that broke the new wood
>Now it is time for carving.
>We have one sap and one root
>Let there be commerce between us.'
>(Pact)
>
>About this time - I do not know the exact date when he wrote this poem
>- he was working on his first, later rejected 3 Cantos, meaning he was
>leaving the highly densed (over?)aesthesised provençale miniatures
>reaching his peak of art as a writer of a long song of history and
>man's part in it.
>And poems like 'Ortus', 'Come my cantilations' or 'Salutation [1-3]'
>he wrote about this time ('I beseech you learn to say 'I'/...for you
>are no part, but a whole/No portion, but a being.') would not have
>been possible, I think, without his shocklike insight into the
>parallels between Whitman's and his own 'poetical mission' which among
>others creates a new and important persona for him: the preacher for
>the masses, a role he would have strictly rejected 1 or 2 years ago.
>
>Just some unsorted ideas hope its a right trace.
>books used: Carpenter, A serious character (Life of EP)
>Personae in the bilingual german edition tr. E. Hesse
>
>Love
>Martin
>
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