Sib
PARTISAN REVIEW
part as long as he is or seems a successful artist. It is still justifiable to
demand that he be a successful human being before anything else, even
if at the cost of his art.
As
it is, psychopathy has become endemic
among artists and writers, in whose company the moral idiot is tolerated
as perhaps nowhere else in society.
Although it is irrelevant to the discussion, I must not let fall the
opportunity to say at this point that, long before I heard of Pound's
fascist sympathies, I was struck by his chronic failure to apprehend the
substance, the
concr~te
reality, of the things he talked about or did.
I feel this failure in his poetry just as much as in what he wrote about
painting and music. As a poet he seems to me to have always been
more virtuoso than artist and to have seldom grasped the reality of the
poem as a whole, as something with a beginning, middle, and ending.
Thus, usually, any line or group of lines of a poem by Pound impresses
me as superior to the whole of which it is part. (I would, however, except
the "Mauberley" poems and several others of the same period from this
stricture.)
IRVING HOWE:
That "a poet's technical accomplishments can transform ma–
terial that is ugly and vicious into beautiful poetry" is at least possible;
but
how far
(as Mr. Barrett asks) he can do so I hardly know. One
thing seems certain: Pound hasn't done it. There is nothing very
beautiful in "the yidd is a stimulant," though there is in "pull down
thy vanity." Pound the crank is only rarely Pound the poet.
Doesn't this split in Pound make possible a justification of the
Bollingen award? I think not. I would move beyond Mr. Barrett's
question and assume that the Pisan Cantos
did
contain the best poetry
of
1948.
That does not yet settle the question of whether Pound should
have been given the award. For while believing in the autonomy of
aesthetic judgment, I believe in it so deeply that I also think there are
some situations when it must be disregarded.
I am against any attempt to curtail Pound's right to publish, and I
don't want to see him prosecuted. (I don't like police measures; and
cops aren't qualified to handle poets, not even mad or fascist poets.)
I am, however, also against any campaign to condemn the Bollingen
judges. What is involved in the Pound case is not a matter for public
action but for a dialogue of conscience. But while defending Pound's
rights, I could not in good conscience acquiesce to
honor
him with a
literary award-which, if you please, must also mean to honor him as a
man.
