BOOKS
731
The business of the poet is to be more conscious of his own lan–
guage than other men, to be more sensitive to the feeling, more aware
of the meaning of every word he uses, more aware of the history of the
language and of every word he uses, than other men.
The more one ponders it the more difficult a concept does "lan–
guage" become to delimit. To be sensitive to a language is to be sensi–
tive to a culture. You can only hope to be sensitive to a language of the
past, or to a foreign language, out of your sensitiveness to your own
contemporary culture--out of your sensitiveness to your own language,
your sensitiveness and consciousness in the present.
And here we come again to Pound's limitations. How can he have
offered with such conviction his Guides, his
How to Reads,
his quintes–
sential propaedeutics for poets, with their prescriptions of Provenc;al,
medieval Italian, Chi ese, and so on? How could he discriminate so
perversely and confidently in favor of so dull a set of conventions as the
Provenc;al-conventions with so inferior a culture behind them and in
them? when the Middle Ages have so much to offer that is so much
more worth study, and in the past of his own language? "Really one
DON'T
need to know a language. One
NEEDS,
damn well needs, to
know the few hundred words in the few really good poems that any
language has in it." He didn't really know what a culture was at
all–
in spite of his noble desire "to set the arts in their rightful place as the
acknowledged guide and lamp of civilization." Though he boasted that,
"neither Irish nor Catholic, I have had more medieval contact than
most, through Dante and my
Proven~al,"
he knew about medieval
civilization essentially nothing. And he knew about Europe, one is
driven to say too, essentially nothing.
For the admirable American energy and disinterestedness and gen–
erosity that were his virtues carried with them certain attendant dis–
abilities. He glimpsed in poetry and art light and significance that
should, he felt, make life worth living; and he devoted himself with
magnificent single-mindedness to the service of what he saw. But of the
nature of that and its relation to life, he had only the most limited under–
standing-barbarian, one is inclined
to
say, but the barbarians had cul–
tures in precisely the sense that Pound remained unaware of. He could
judge that he had been born "in a half-savage country," but the un–
awareness persisted invincibly. "It takes about 600 to make a civiliza–
tion," he says in 1928. Anyone who doubts the significance of this should
ponder the following:
The Greek populace was
PAID
.to attend the great Greek tragedies,
and dam well wouldn't have gone otherwise, or if there had been a
cinema.
