Daniel, Carroll, et al. -- I see your points about alluding to current events, but that doesn't explain Pounds' reticence at all: when he wasn't alluding to current events (whether through social credit or through fascism) he was alluding to the current events of past times (such as different banks' foundings, the careers of different statesmen, the contents of mail-bags, etc.) He was certainly more of a topical poet than, say, Eliot, though no less oblique for being so interested in the motion of political tides. Whitman, as a handy counter-example, also wrote of current events with a representative mania, and an argument could quickly be made that Pound's project was an extension and a critique of Whitman's. I think we'll need a more sophisticated tool to divide the "best" from the not-so-best poets than their uses of current events (whatever those might be). (And I don't think that identifying value is really what I'm interested in pursuing. I take it for granted that Pound is one of the best, for whatever reason, reasons that I know change a lot from reader to reader.) It is often the complaint of Marxist critics (esp. Lukacs) that Modernism failed to develop the kind of historical consciousness to represent the material processes of social reality. I think that they're right in a sense: certainly Pound's representations were often deflected into less immediately typical, more temporally remote historical figures (Malatesta instead of Harry Anslinger, Adams instead of Hoover, Kung instead of Al Capone, etc.) But this presents a picture of the modernist avant-garde as in flight from their moment, into the antique past, without adequately expressing how that flight to the past was itself a properly (or peculiarly) modern response, made in the face of unique social challenges, and not necessarily a type of retreat. This is partially what I'm trying to understand through this Prohibition reading of Canto II; I would like to approach the poem's response to its contexts by understanding how its Dionysian mythologies had (and have) contemporary functions. (By the way, having reread the poem, I don't see much evidence of Kenner's oblique reading. Grape-leaves scuppering the oar-locks are about as close as I get to images of intoxication. The preponderance of liquids in the Canto along with the Dionysian metamorphosis that is its subject seem to be likely entry points, but I don't see how Kenner develops enough from this to assert the reading he does.) All discussion is welcome -- Jon On Sunday, October 12, 2003, at 01:34 PM, Daniel Pearlman wrote: > I'd guess that the best poets don't concern themselves much with > alluding to current events in their poetry. > ==Dan > > At 01:15 PM 10/12/2003 -0500, you wrote: >> Dear friends -- >> >> I last night ran across a claim (authored by Hugh Kenner) that Canto >> II >> is an "oblique protest against the Prohibition amendment". ... >> >> It does seem strange that such a socially sweeping legislative act >> should not find fuller representation in the verse of Modernist poets, >> Go Cubs! >> Jon Weidler (in Chicago) >