Bob,
Pound's patriotism is complex, but let me try to
address, in a slapdash sort of way, some of your criticisms of Pound. His
patriotism bears little resemblance to the sense of homeland one finds in the
Old English elegies, which is kin-centric to an extreme, largely because of
the central role kinship bonds played in Anglo-Saxon society and law. But to say
that kin and homeland had no meaning for Pound is an exaggeration bordering on
inaccuracy; though there is, I think, a kernel of truth in what you say, for
Pound does often seems to take a rather detached view of "family" in general and
did want away from them and away from home, and if he was concerned about The
Common Man, he certainly made no hero of Him:
From SALVATIONISTS:
Ah yes, my
songs, let us resurrect
The very excellent term _Rusticus_.
Let us apply it in all its opprobrium
To those to whom it applies.
THE PLUNGE
I would bathe myself in
strangeness:
These comforts heaped upon me,
smother me!
I burn, I scald for the
new,
New friends, new
faces
Places!
Oh to be out of
this,
This that is all I
wanted
-- save the
new.
And you,
Love, you the much, the more
desired!
Do I not loathe all walls,
streets, stones,
All mire, mist, all
fog,
All ways of
traffic?
You, I would have flow over me
like water,
Oh, but far out of
this!
Grass, and low fields, and
hills,
And sun,
Oh, sun enough!
Out, and alone, among
some
Alien people!
Unsevered family and domestic ties are also the
subject of derision in his early poetry:
Sketch 48b. 11
At the age of 27
Its home mail is still opened by its maternal
parent
And its office mail may be opened by its parent of
the opposite gender.
It is an officer,
and a
gentleman,
and an architect.
But when
Pound's not posturing, or being the satirist, his feelings about leaving his
homeland are actually full of deep, if displaced, sentiment. Compare The Exile's Letter, and the Four Poems of Departure
from _Cathay_:
Now the high clouds cover the
sun
And I can not see Choan
afar
And I am sad.
Many years later, during WWII, in one of the broadcasts, Pound starts to reminisce about
his father and his job at the mint, and his mother and her Quaker
family, who considered themselves superior to his father's family, and
about his uncle, and the black woman who was their cook, better than
any French chef, and the black man who helped out around the house, but was
often to be found playing checkers on the cracker barrel ... I don't have
the text here at hand to quote from, but its a rather poignant passage in
which Pound seems to be almost talking to himself, his radio audience
overhearing him, and he's wondering what it is in "my psychology," he says,
that caused these memories of his family to come to him.
Those points define a periphery.
Pound the public man, the poet-pampheleteer whose
subject is the destructive power international money exerts over nations, may
seem to have lost sight of his "geneological base", as you put it, and may seem,
for all the rapid shifting of time and place that occurs in the Cantos, to be
"rootless". But Pound's constant return to the simple tangible things to
be found in the marketplace -- food, leather goods, cattle, sheep,
tongs, wagon wheels-- and his frequent excerpting of the simple, understandable,
homely, non-specialist language of ancient statutes governing domestic commerce
and trade, are sure indications that the concerns of "the average citizen"
are never far from his mind. Pound began his career aiming for the elitist
immortality of the bard. But as his vision matured, he came to want to leave
behind a work that might do something to preserve the American consitution and
to make American democracy immortal... a "paradiso terrestre".
Tim Romano
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, February 26, 2000 10:05
PM
Subject: Re: tim romano & exile
tim romano writes:
>...forced exile is a grievous separation from friend and
kin, and loss of identity.
tim,
yeh,...egregiously absent in
ep, homesickness
...signifying? home & kin bore no
meaning for him ?
...signifying no geneological base,
prinicple of structure or coherence.
wouldn't that make for a rootless, shallow
poetry;
as it would, a person?
...a kinda "california poetry",
ie, quintessentially "american" (in the sardonic
sense),
all novelty and technique?
and indeed, doesn't his "adams cantos" america seem
got from books? stilted?...even more than his
cathay?
but, supreme irony, (as adorno pt'd out)
odysseus
is the archetypal bourgeois. hero-ideal of a
gk merchant society aborning.
in contrast to achilles' noble absolutes, magnanimity,
odysseus is all cunning and trickery
...instrumental reason
...very much "the donald" or "bill gates" or
"the jew".
so...while joyce uses the archetype to great
effect,
it seems to me ep's odysseus is
ultimately incoherent.
whadaya think?
bob
Bob,
You're right to say that Pound's "more the
adventurer", at least as a young man. He paganizes, if you will, the
exile theme in his translation of The Seafarer, turning it into a rejection
of the comforts and security of the "burghers" while extolling with
much bravado the open sea-road. But in OE elegies, that's not at
all how the exile theme is portrayed: forced exile is a grievous
separation from friend and kin, and loss of identity. There, the theme of
exile usually ends in a renunciation of "this life". As an old man, Pound's
comes close to this kind of renunciation.
Tim