TH!:
POUND
AWA~D
513
a) All created existence is a good.
b) Evil is a negative perversion of created good.
c) Man has free will to choose between good and evil.
d) But all men
~re
sinners with a perverted will.
An art which did not accurately reflect evil would not be good art.
3) This does not dispose, however, of the question of censorship.
Whatever its intention, a work of art cannot compel the reader to look
at it with detachment, and prevent
him
from using it as a stimulus to
and excuse for feelings which he should condemn. Everyone, I am
sure, has had the experience of reading a book which he was aware,
at the time or later, was bad for him personally, whatever its artistic
merit, or however harmless it might be for others, because, in this case,
he was not capable of exercising free will, and was therefore not read–
ing it as a work of art. For instance, Baudelaire's poem
La Charogne
would not be healthy reading for a necrophiIist. Antisemitism is, un–
fortunately, not only a feeling which all gentiles at times feel, but also,
and this is what matters, a fceling of which the majority of them are not
ashamed. Until they are, they must be regarded as children who have not
yet reached the age of consent in this matter and from whom, there–
fore, all books, whether works of art or not, which reflect feeling about
Jews-and it doesn't make the slightest difference whether they are
pro or anti, the
New York Post
can be as dangerous as
Der Sturmer–
must be withheld.
If
it were to seem likely that the
Pisan Cantos
would be read by
people of this kind, I would be in favor of censoring it (as in the
case of the movie,
Oliver Twist).
That would not however prevent me
awarding the
Pisan Cantos
a prize before withholding it from the public.
But I do not believe that the likelihood exists in this case.
ROBERT GORHAM DAVIS:
The Pound award, it seems to me, is not most profitably
taken as a problem in aesthetics. When form and content or free will
and determinism or nominalism and realism are allowed to fall into
this kind of abstract polarity, they can be argued about fruitlessly until
doomsday. What confronts us in the Pound case is a complex of ideas
dominant in American criticism during the forties, and made so largely
by the talents and critical activities of some of the judges, of Eliot,
Auden, Tate and Warren. The judges were judging themselves along
with Pound, their master. But nearly everyone in America who is serious
about literature is involved in one way or another.
