THE POUND
AWARD
515
art, but of the requirement of certain social attitudes, particularly
ethical and communal ones, for literature, and rejection of certain
others. These are programmatic demands, which are quite separable
from the real achievements and values which they rationalize or ex–
ploit. Such demands can be refuted even by the example of many of the
masters these critics claim as their own, and they are inapplicable to
whole areas of literary experience which these critics undervalue or ig–
nore.
If
Ezra Pound's
Cantos
are read with a wider literary and his–
torical sense than the "new criticism" permi ts, they gain in meaning. As
poetry they fail, despite Pound's sensibility. Their incoherence is real
incoherence; it is not "achieved form." But against the author's intention
they are highly revealing. They are a test case for a whole set of values,
and stand self-condemned. They are important documents; they should
be available, they should be read. But they deserve no prize.
CLEMENT GREENBERG:
I agree with Mr. Barrett. The Fellows in American Letters
should have said more-that is, if they had more to say, and they should
have had. As a J ew, I myself cannot help being offended by the matter
of Pound's latest poetry; And since 1943 things like that make me feel
physically
afraid too.
I do not quarrel here with the Fellows' aesthetic verdict, but I ques–
tion its primacy in the affair at hand, a primacy that hints at an absolute
acceptance of the autonomy not only of art but of every separate field
of human activity. Does no hierarchy of value obtain among them?
Would Mr. Eliot, [or instance, approve of this for his
"Christian society?"
Life includes and is more important than art, and it judges things
by their consequences. I am not against the publication of
The Pisan
Cantos,
even though they offend me; my perhaps irrational sensitivity
as a Jew cedes to my fear of censorship in general, and to the anticipa–
tion of the pleasure to be gotten from reading poetry, and I have to
swallow that consequence. But I wish the Fellows had been, or shown
themselves, more aware of the additional consequence when they awarded
their BoEingen
Prize.
They could have taken greater trouble to explain
their decision and thereby spared me, and a good many Jews like me,
additional offense. (This does not mean, necessarily, that I am against
the award itself.)
In any case, I am sick of the art-adoration that prevails among
cultured people, more tn our time than in any other: that art silliness
which condones almost any moral or intellectual failing on the artist's
