BOOKS
POUND, JEFFERS, AND OTHERS
THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND. New Directions. $5.00.
THE DOUBLE AXE AND OTHER POEMS. By Robinson Jeffers. Rondom
House. $2.75.
SELECTED POEMS. By Vernon Wotkins. New Directions. $3 .00.
A LITTLE TREASURY OF AMERICAN POETRY. Edited by Oscar Willioms.
Charles Scribner's Sons. $3.00.
In an ill-regulated (usurious) society, nothing fits, Pound
says. The bread is bad, crafts are lost, "None learneth to weave gold in
her pattern," and "corpses are set to banquet." In a regulated society,
"When the prince has gathered about him/ All the savants and artists,
his riches will be fully employed." So were the riches employed of the
tyrant Sigismundo Malatesta, rapist, strangler, poisoner, breaker of
treaties, in building a marvelously adorned pagan temple to celebrate,
while his second wife still lived, his passion for Isotta degli Atti. Tyrants
act like tyrants, though they should
be
guided by the councils of Con–
fucius, of Kung, who wrote on the
bo
leaves:
"If
a man have not order
within him/ He can not spread order about him," and "Anyone can
run to excesses,/ it is easy to shoot past the mark,/ It is hard to stand
firm
in
the middle."
If
the prince, "the Boss," Mussolini or Willie Stark, is properly ad–
vised, he can maintain in righteous stability the unchanging society
ordained by heaven, can exact benevolently the feudal submission of
subjects, can found a long-lasting dynasty, like that of the Pharaohs, who
ruled Egypt by "authentic utterance" according to the design of Maat,
or right order, inherent in the structure of creation. But the
Analects
themselves are hardly more ordered than the
Cantos,
and when Con–
fucius set out to write a history,
Spring and Autumn,
to which Pound
frequently refers, his characterization of men and events, of murders
and treacheries, raised as many perplexing questions of morality for his
disciples as some of the more Coughlinite passages in the
Cantos.
We are
on surer ground with the Adamses whose letters and journals, quoted,
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