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PARTISAN REVIEW
form the Pound cult in Italy and England are clearly convinced that
Pound is a universal genius. The more rational reader should not have
much trouble in seeing that Pound is sometimes a fine literary critic
and that in such poems as "The Seafarer," "Compleynt of a Gentle–
man," "Planh for the Young English King," the Mauberley poems, and
parts of the
Ca.ntos
he is a fine, though certainly a minor, poet. It
should
be
just as clear that outside of his craft and particularly in
economic and political matters Pound
has
always been an arrant sim–
pleton. His admirers speak of his more dubious views as "compensatory
exaggerations" and try to convince us that they are merely "incidental."
But the fact is that they are radical and central, and one
can
only
stand in awe of the self-discipline, or the luck, which could occasionally
conquer so much omnivorous triviality, unreason, and prejudice.
Presumably there are two alternatives if you set out, as Pound did,
to preach that philosophy, poetry, or "culture" can redeem society. You
can admit that there is no easily discernible relation between poetic
thought and the actual possibilities of social reality and therefore,
like Plato or Dante, imagine an ideal world to which poetic ideas
immediately attach. Or, like Matthew Arnold, you can try to translate
your poetic ideas into cultural formulations so that they relate to the
world as it is or may become. Now Pound, being the advocate of "the
clarification of the word," of leadership, of intense spiritual discipline,
ought to have proceeded in the manner of Plato or Dante. At least
he should have conceived of the relation between the imagination and
historical reality
as a problem.
But this he utterly failed to do. He told us
only that the ideal world would ensue upon the "revolution" or the
"rectification" of the word- and left us to envision
a
society which
had grown regenerate or "clean" by producing a few excellent lyric
poets (and surrendering itself, one must presumably add, to Mussolini).
In Pound's essay called "Hell" and elsewhere he has shown him–
self a fine critic of Dante's poetic language. Yet Pound's followers
make the most presumptuous claims for his alleged affinity with Dante.
Mr. Ronald Duncan exclaims that Pound can be compared only with
"the Florentine ... for there is no other." At a more sophisticated level
is the theological jargon of Mr. Hugh Kenner, who in a manner now
very fashionable appears to read both the
Iliad
and the
Cantos
as if
Dante had written them. Mr. Kenner perceives in the
Cantos
a "world
... of hierarchic modalities of vision." Only one of the present essayists,
D. S. Carne-Ross, calls into question Pound's absurd idea that Dante's
"whole hell reeks with money" and that in the
Inferno
"fraud" equals
"usura."
