At 12:32 AM 12/1/99 -0500, Patricia Cockram wrote:
 
>    It was Pound who equated sincerity with technique.  His anti-semitic
>obsession was wrongheaded, if not pathological, but he was sincere, and that
>is one reason so much of his work is both beautiful and disturbing.
 
I sort of see what you mean, Patricia. "The worst / Are full of passionate
intensity," intoned Yeats, a great poet who stood with the worst. But boy,
I wish I knew how to understand that hard word "sincerity."
 
It fits Pound in one obvious biographical way: he held to his political and
economic beliefs no matter what, at great cost to himself. And yet I should
think sincerity must entail some element of free choice, and in that
respect we have to worry a little when we apply the term to Pound. No
economist of any standing has ever paid the slightest attention to Pound's
ideas about money, for instance, but that rejection had no effect whatever
on the curriculum of the Ezuversity. By contrast, John Crowe Ransom
abandoned agrarianism after he worked systematically through the
economists' criticisms of _I'll Take My Stand_ and concluded that the
economists were right. You wouldn't call that insincere, would you? No;
you'd just say that Ransom was a rational man trying to learn from his
mistakes.
 
Pound's other sincerities were equally durable in their defiance of
reality. There's something to be said for punctual trains, for instance,
but after 23 years of Fascism the Italians were happy enough to kick
Mussolini's body to pieces. Fascism would seem not to have worked. No
reflection of that little fact in Pound's oeuvre, though.
 
And whatever it accomplished 2500 years ago, Confucianism as of the
twentieth century was doing a lot more harm than good. It too didn't work.
(Ask me about the status of women in South Korea before and after it became
a predominantly Christian society.)
 
And Pound's antisemitism was an affront to his own language, because it
consisted entirely of cliches. When Pound was a young man, the
anti-Dreyfusards and eugenists included many intelligent people among their
numbers, but by the time he was 50 he was alone with the Jason Compsons.
 
So many unconvinceabilities! And yet Pound is the man who said "Make it
new." There's sincerity in that phrase, but I should think it's the
sincerity of technique, not the sincerity of the sad stony heart. But
sursum corda: the sincerity of technique is the one that didn't die on
November 1, 1972.
 
Jonathan Morse