The Modern moment is an interesting one because it seems to be poised on the sliding hinge between the past and the present. One way to define the postmodern is to see it as the moments after this hinge has been surpassed, and the past is no longer felt as present, relevant, or real. That's why postmodernisms are distinguished by a turning away from historicity and the elaboration of surfaces. (For more on this, see Fred Jameson's book.) I would venture that Pound did not blow the horn for uniqueness, at least not in a way that Emerson did, and that he is a better writer for it. The point of Canto IV, it seems to me, is that the same pattern of energy that invests the story of the fall of Troy appears again, in China, in Provence, in America, and that the stories we are drawn to tell resemble one another, and repeat themselves through us. So there is a kind of identity, in other words, between the circumstances of the past and the circumstances of the present: the modernizing world will not, then, fulfill its hubris by becoming wholly new. This seems to me to explain why the past and its fragments are wrapped into Pound's efforts to "make it new", not because he was clumsy or uninventive, or because he failed to take his own advice, but because the leading edge of historical time is the same, whether in Troy on the Mediterranean, or Troy, NY. In this way, I guess Pound was warning against taking the superficial alterations implied by the modern too seriously: history, and its dramatic junctures and ruptures, have not singled us out to be special in some absolute fashion. Pound considered (I would argue) that renewing and revivifying present day poetic practice implied accommodating the presentness of the past, as well as the lived present he inhabited. Make it new and make it old are the sides of the same coin, and that's one of the paradoxical truths EP communicates. The new and the old (by which I mean the ancient, not the immediate, past (more on this later)) are related dialectically, as concepts, and map between them an identity that language (especially the language of people self-consciously modernizing) tends to obscure, or even deny. On the subject of Emerson, I just read his poem about being in the Adirondacks, and I found it fascinating. Has anyone else read it? There's a wonderful moment where the speaker and his companions (all of whom are intellectuals, natch, and who must be accompanied by guides to paddle the canoes and keep them from getting lost) have their pastoral, idyllic, natural-type reverie interrupted by news that the transAtlantic cable has been completed. Emerson goes on to talk about the glories of sending the lightning to school, and of making it earn a decent wage by being useful to us through the telegraph cable. And so the dialectic of enlightenment continues, and nature is made instrumental through the power of our reason, and Emerson sees no problem or contradiction with being a romantic naturalist and an advocate of progressive technology. Of course, we can hardly blame him; he hadn't had the chance to see how persistently pernicious the intrumentation of nature could eventually become, and how destructive some of the consequences of progress would be. (Or can we?) There's a really good book called Orientalism, Modernism and the American Poem by Robert Kern. It draws a really convincing line from Emerson through Fenellossa (did I spell that right?) to Pound, and even beyond Pound to Gary Snyder. Emerson never wrote about Chinese (or at least wrote very little), but he did write about hieroglyphics, as did many of his contemporaries. The attraction of hieroglyphs for those antebellum writers was very similar to EP's attraction to the Chinese ideogram, in that the pictorial, verb-plus-noun concentration of those signs seemed to present things in themselves. Kern describes (quite well, I think) how writers more and more desired a release from or simplification of grammatical, alphabetic abstraction, and looked to these "ancient" scripts for models. Of course, famously, Pound did not understand the Chinese he was advocating. Instead, using the Imagist tools he and his friends had been pursuing (originally employed simply to escape moldy, ossified Victorian forms) EP found a way to represent better the concision of a Chinese poem, and the all-at-onceness of ideogrammatic writing. Before Pound, we should remember, Chinese poetry translated into English was often stripped of any hint of Chinese-ness: a four-line, four-syllables-per-line stanza of Chinese verse customarily became a fourteen line verse paragraph in English. EP and others like him were interested in cutting off the fat of such "translations", partially in order to invent a more appropriate representation of Chinese in English, but partially because it gave his Imagist principles a veneer of deeper antiquity, and a tradition older than English verse. Once again, making it new implies for Pound making it old. So, concision is part of his aesthetic. It was also part of his literary programme, and a tool in his polemical toolbox. It represented more than one thing, and had just as much a literary-political valence as it did an aesthetic valence. "The aesthetic" that people seem to yearn for (much as I long for a grapefruit right now, something light and pleasant) frustrates them as often as not, in that "the aesthetic" is no more isolatable a quality of a text (or other object) than weight or color is isolatable from a physical object. It's lovely to think about the loveliness of lovely things, even when the loveliness takes work to find, but there are many other qualities of an artwork than just its beauty-function. (I'm suddenly reminded of the military school that Homer & Marge are considering for Bart, and the English class they visit: a cadet stands at attention, and responds to the teacher's question with "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, sir!" To tip my hat a little to the Marxists that trained me, truth and beauty, such attractive notions, mix to make one hell of an ideological cocktail. Caution: the surgeon general warns that truth-and-beauty may impair your ability to operate heavy machinery. Drink responsibly.) What's interesting to me is that the past that Pound used for his word-hoard was most decidedly not the recent past. The energy he found so useful in that variety of antiquities he didn't seem to find in, say (for Stoner's sake) Emerson. No, no, not at all. The Victorians (including their American counterparts) did not take seriously the negative side of modernization, and did what they could to absorb the earlier revolts of Romanticism, "to ensure domestic tranquility". Modern poets love to spite the Victorian matron, to make the widows wince. This might have just been generational resentment and distaste, an urge to kill the parents and start fresh. Funny how often that happens. It's as though ancestor worship demands really old ancestors; the ones we have right nearby are no good at all, and must be stopped from filling the world with doilies and Golden Book Anthologies of Sweet Poesy for every Girl and Boy. So, yeah. That's all I have to say. I promise I'll be more concise in the future. Regards to all, Jon