tim, yer right,...pardon the lapse. clearly god like everything is always dual - apollonian/dionysian, jehovah/jesus. and its certainly a recognition-event poem, but as such it signals the arrival in the speaker of the lyrical, not religious, sensibility, ...the heightened sense (wonderfull-ness) of the simple, unmediated, sensual moments of the circumambient existential present. pure lyricism, haiku, embedded in longish stretches of rhetoric, is ep's poesis ...so i agree with carrol cox, his paganism is stilted, effect.... ...and that, finally, he's not a poet of the grande narrative (religion, myth, archetype, allegory,...) bob ----- Original Message ----- From: Tim Romano <[log in to unmask]> To: <[log in to unmask]> Sent: Wednesday, June 14, 2000 7:32 AM Subject: Re: Pound myth and religion > Bob, > One could certainly relate The Tree to Yeat's Leda and the Swan or > Veronica's Napkin, or to poems by Graves, or to films by Cocteau. Not > because of any influences, however, but simply because they're all about the > same kind of liminal experience. > > Eliot is "religious" in the western smitten-by-guilt augustinian tradition. > Pound was a pagan. How can we speak of the Anglican religion and the > religions of Bali? The word encompasses a wide range of practices and > beliefs. > > This is not a poem that celebrates the "carnal" but rather the semi-divine > nature of humanity (the gods must be "_kindly_ entreated"); the "elm-oak" > alludes to the halves of the soul, the other quotations I adduced will bear > this out. > > Tim