On Thu, 23 Jul 1998 13:43:36 -0400 wrote... > Right about the distinctions, and I also agree that the Cantos is not a Taoist poem. I do think however that in order to create a paradiso terrestre, Pound needed to subordinate all of that ordering and regulating to a disordering, deregulating universe, and that he does accomplish this to some degree at the end of his poem. Pound was a work in progress, and one of the developments that ocurred over time was his marked, if never abslute shift away from a desire to see order as predominant in the universe, and in the world of man. Giving up that dominating order--if he does so--is to make a turn, I think, towards what may be seen as Taoist philosophy, no matter where he finds its elements. That he consistently condemned the Western Platonic traditions and saw Eastern ones--if particularly Confucian ones--as the cure for Western ills caused by Platonic traditions, suggests that he was particularly disposed to Eastern thought. He wanted to find his answers there, even if they also may have been found in like form in the West. That ought to lean us a little towards favoring Taoism as a part of the changes that occurr in Pound's work, over time. And his sustained emaphasis on aesthetic movement of energy through concrete images--Sappho has it, and Pound tries for it, but arguably none of his Western models enacted that movement with the regularity found in the Taoist poets Pound found in the Fenollosa notebooks. He stayed away from the sennin poems, or took the emphasis on other worldliness out of them, but he wanted that movement. His early Sapphic translations show the difference between what he could see he wanted to poetry, and what he was able to bring to form. But this changes, in stops and spurts--interrupted by his willed attempts to create poetic expression ideogrammatically. Pound was not an avowed Taoist, to be sure, but something of it is working in his verse. Yes, elements, I suppose, and certainly not part of a program. But something there. Were you in China? Robert E. Kibler Department of English University of Minnesota [log in to unmask] fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis, Panaque Silvanumque senem Nymphasque sorores.