PARTISAN REVIEW
misquoted, and colloquialized, make the substance of some ten of the
cantos. The theme is the same, however: the maintenance of class dis–
tinctions, the conservative rule of an enlightened few, who understand
by Right Reason the relation between the cosmos and society, in this
case the Stoic cosmos of Cleanthes'
Hymn to Zeus,
"part of Adams'
paideuma."
Pound's is a much barer, more eighteenth-century cosmos than that
of his friend Yeats, whose 4000 year cycle, though ultimately delimiting
and anti-historical, could give imaginative order to a wide range of
historical events and characters, Troy and Calvary, Alexander and Pope
Julius. But Pound, whose
Cant-os
Yeats complained about in the pre–
face to the
Vision,
goes back into history in a tinkering spirit, to see
what was done or might havt; been done to bring order into a regime
anytime anywhere by control of credit. The disorder of most Western
and Chinese history is simply "sheer ignorance ov the natr ov money,"
and in the West in the last century and a half, this has been intensified
by
"a few big jews' vendetta on goyim."
What is needed is a strong ruler (even Petain rather than Blum)
to keep order, and someone who understands social credit to advise him,
as Pound advised Mussolini and tried, through Borah and Bankhead,
to reach Roosevelt on Pound's visit to this country just before the war.
Since "with one day's reading a man may have the key in his hands,"
the problem is rational and technical, and history is conceived imagina–
tively not as a total development, but as a disorder to be stopped and
set right by a formula. "But in Russia they bungled and did not ap–
parently
j
grasp the idea of work-certificate."
With such simplification, most of history becomes irrelevant: all
the complex relationships of types of sensibility, character, ideas and in–
stitutions to economic and technical developments, and all the human
drama of good and bad will, of conflicting values, and of moral choice.
But Pound is a poet, alive to .quiddities, the
haecceitas
"thisness" of Duns
Scotus, whom he, like Hopkins, greatly admires. And so while he searches
history as journalist and polemicist for certain constants in the governing
of a state where the arts flourish, he responds as poet to the amusing
anecdotes, the characteristic modes of utterance, the beauties of con–
text and imaginative association, which he encounters in his search.
These contextual and non-rational elements are not used, however, to
qualify and transform the ideas, which, on the contrary, are unaffected
by them. And so the poetry is never ideographic in the way that Pound
and his admirers assert. In an ideogram, brushed-in images, at once
concrete and general, are brought together in such a way, in such a
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