BOO KS
589
The best essays in
An Examination of Ezra Pound,
those of Eliot,
Tate, Edith Sitwell, Carne-Ross, and G. S. Fraser, allow us to discrimin–
ate the good from the bad. The ill-considered Post-script which Eliot
added to his essay and which appears to retract so much of what is
said in the essay itself is a sign of the general uneasiness he seems to
feel when writing of Pound, an uneasiness which may perhaps be at–
tributed to an imponderably personal relationship. He tells us that
Pound must be judged "on his total work for literature . . . on his
poetry,
and
his criticism,
and
his influence on men and events at a
turning point in literature." This could not be the basis of a favorable
judgment if it were not apparent that by "his criticism" Eliot means
"the notes of a poet on his craft." Even so, Eliot very diligently avoids
those explicit strictures on the work of Pound which either reason or his
religious principles ought to lead him to make. As for the young
Poundians, they constantly allude to but never describe an ordered
hierarchy of moral and aesthetic values which, they
claim,
contains and
harmonizes all that Pound has done and thought. And we are told that
if criticism does not perceive this hierarchy, it is "spinning webs out of
its own inside" (Mr. Kenner) or lapsing into "adolescent romantic
aestheticism" (Mr. Russell).
These essays should teach us anew to eye with suspicion the
claim
that a work of art projects a "world of articulate forms" in which
(as Mr. Kenner says of the
Cantos)
"distinctions between theme and
treatment, thought and feeling, the poetical and the unpoetical, the
contemplative and the factive, should become factitious." These terms
imply "form" and "content," and the idea that the distinction between
them is not real in Pound's poetry is a little curious as applied to a
poet who in writing of William Carlos Williams once ventured the
opinion that "plot, major form, or outline should be left to authors who
feel some inner need for the same." The fact is that Pound has never
felt the inner need, or perceived the objective efficacy, of form, or even
of elementary logic, in any discourse whatsoever except the short lyric
poem.
In a successful poem, in all great poems, there is a final fusion
of form and content, whereby content is refined and sharpened and
form is related to experience in a manner so wholly marvelous that
nothing the poet can say will have the power to offend either sensibility
or intelligence. There are a few moments when Pound is able to speak
even of "usura" in his poems without exciting our contempt. But our
search after the "world of articulate forms" which fuses form and
content and our praise for the poetic discourse which makes possible
