VA ,RIETY
FURTH ER REMARKS ON THE
POUND AWARD
What I shall say here is not in
further commentary on Mr. Bar–
rett's article in the April issue of
PARTISAN
REVIEW;
nor is it the
"rational, impersonal, and calm
justification" of the Bollingen Prize
which Mr. Barrett was kind enough
to expect of me; I intend rather to
state my own reasons for voting
for
The Pisan Cantos.
I will have
in mind the PARTISAN symposium
without, I hope, being influenced
by it in reconstructing my views
of last November.
From the time I first read
Pound's verse more than thirty
years ago I have considered him
a mixed poet. In an essay written
in 1931, on the first thirty Cantos,
I expressed views which the later
accretions to the work have not
changed: the work for which I
voted is formless, eccentric, and
personal. The Cantos are now, as
I said then, "about nothing at all."
They have a voice but no subject.
As one of the commentators on
Mr. Barrett's article put it, they
have no beginning, middle, or end;
I used similar language in 1931.
Mr. Pound is incapable of sustained
thought in either prose or verse.
His acute verbal sensibility is thus
at the mercy of random flights of
"angelic insight," an Icarian self-
indulgence of prejudice which is
not checked by a total view to
which it could be subordinated.
Thus his antisemitism-which, as
Mr. Auden says, all Gentiles have
felt (I have felt it, and felt hu–
miliated by it)-his antisemitism is
not disciplined by an awareness of
its sinister implications in the real
world of men. Neither Mr. Pound
nor any other man is to be cen–
sured for his feelings; but every
man must answer for what he does
with his feelings. Another of your
commentators shrewdly remarks
Pound's failure to get into his verse
any sort of full concrete reality.
If
there is any poetry of our age
which may be said to be totally
lacking in the historical sense, the
sense of how ideas work in history,
it is Pound's Cantos. His verse is
an anomaly in an age of acute
historical awareness.
I do not know what reasons,
motives, or prejudices prompted
the other affirmative votes. Specu–
lation upon this subject I consider
a gross impropriety. I can only
speak for myself : I have little sym–
pathy with the view that holds
that Pound's irresponsible opinions
merely lie alongside the poetry,
which thus remains uncontamin–
ated by them. The disagreeable
opinions are right in the middle of
the poetry. And they have got to
be seen for what they are: they are
personal, wilful, and unrelated to
a mature and coherent conception
of life, now or in the past. I infer
