how, the poet performs his first
duty, which is towards his craft.
Thereby he accomplishes one or
more of the tasks of which he alone
is capable: enlarging the experi–
ence of his fellows by faithfully
presenting his own; ordering the
chaos of thought and feeling
through which we apprehend real–
ity, and so enabling us to deal with
what might else overwhelm us.
Pound was not good enough at or–
dering, but unquestionably he en–
larged experience for us. And in
doing so he presented evil as
evil, and good as good, although,
divided against himself, he some–
times took a vicious attitude and
spoke evil. This is a reason for cen–
soring his political influence, not
for censoring his poem. No one
can judge how a work of art
will affect those who encounter
it. The stuff of which poetry is
made, however tangled with ideas,
like the stuff of the other arts
changes men's attitudes in subter–
ranean and unexpected ways. The
work of a conservative or even a re–
actionary writer may influence the
reader to become a revolutionist,
and vice versa. Those who believe
in the good life are apt to promote
it, unless they are bad craftsmen.
And this brings us back to the
669
first question. However we answer
it, I think most poets and critics
agree that the Cantos as a whole,
flawed though they are, represent
poetic achievement of a high order.
True, they betray the division in
the mind of the poet. A decade ago
Pound wrote: "Race prejudice is
a red herring. The tool of the man
defeated intellectually, and of the
cheap politician." The red herring
is drawn, dead and stinking, across
some pages of the Cantos. But then
the herring is thrown out. The
stench evaporates. We rejoice
in
the poem not only because of its
unduplicable music, its charged
language, the accurate epithet and
the lively verb that give the qual–
ity of a moment or the pressure of
an age, but also because of convic–
tions embedded in it to which all
people of good will must assent.
If
fascism is one of the "myths" of
the Cantos (as it is of some other
notable poetry), the idea that chief–
ly animates them is that which the
house of Burgundy took for its
motto some centuries ago:
«Radix
omnium malorum est cupiditas."
Other important ideas follow from
tha t. Indeed, the enslavement of
Dionysus, a recurrent motif, is akin
to the prostitution of the arts by
commercialism which makes men
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