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Subject:
From:
En Lin Wei <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
- Ezra Pound discussion list of the University of Maine <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Sun, 13 Aug 2000 07:55:59 GMT
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Donald Wellman has provided a response, and an interpretation of Pound's
poetry, of the sort I hoped for when I posted the question "Give us an
interpretation, please."  His analysis is fascinating to me, and can serve
for us as one of many springboards, capable of launching us into a higher
realm of criticism and analysis than we have reached recently.

He writes:

>For me the Cantos provide access to a polysemous sonority unlike any
>other, a music that matches phrase and image with finely etched details
>of musical accent or color and visual precision.  I am also frequently
>aghast at how ugly certain passages are, when his prejudices boil . . .

[So the "ugliness" comes in part from the content, and the ideas expressed,
I take it.  May the same be said of the beauty?  I ask this in anticipation
of another question, which I ask below].

>sometimes making me wonder if the best of what he has done is only
>artifice: "the ant's a centaur in his dragon world." Is this line
>evidence of monomania: the ordinary individual has the capacity of a
>demi-god to instruct or defeat the big players in his world? or is it a
>perception of scale with reference to the world we share --a scale that
>makes beauty possible. Well my coterie values that sense of scale and
>every reference. My personal coterie reading gasps at the beauty of
>"When the mind swings by a grass-blade / an ant's forefoot shall save
>you / the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower" (LXXXIII 553).
>Has metaphor ('as') ever had more substance than in this last line? I
>can read this thread through to the concluding "I am not a demigod" -- I
>gasp. I insist that this is more than feeling for form-- it is a feeling
>for something all too beautifully real.
>

I have always found this portion of the Cantos to be one of the most moving
and most important.  Something "all too beautifully real" you say.  But can
you tell us, in your words what this reality is, and how it relates to the
intitial purpose of the Cantos (or how it relates to the totality of that
work, given its ending)?  The acknowlegement "I am not a demigod," strikes
me as somewhat similar to Coriolanus' realization at the conclusion of
Shakespeare's play, when the hero realizes that he is, in fact, just like
other men, just as weak, just as vascillating, just as prone to emotional
outbursts when confronted with the purely human connection.  By the time
Pound writes this Canto, he has for all intents and purposes, lost his faith
in fascism, and even in Confucius.  So what does he have left?

It might be customary to say, he has his belief in beauty.  He can still
create beauty.  But this is a truism, and a platitude I think.  Artistic and
poetic beauty have a CONTENT as well as a form.  We could easily make a list
of the essential beliefs which are reflected in such epic works as Virgil's
Aeneid, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Vyasa's Mahabharata.  What belief system
is left to be reflected in the completed Cantos, as it is left to us?  If
the poem talks about a "reality" what is this "reality"?  It must have some
suggested content, some meaning (beyond the mere momentary experience of
beauty itself), some philosophical or metaphysical grounding.  We are
talking about Pound here (not Samuel Becket), so the question of a meaning,
and even of a reach for Ultimate Meaning, must be considered.  At the very
least, should it not be considered as a lost objective, or as a deliberately
abandoned objective?


---Wei
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