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absoluteness with which Pound advanced his simple panacea-is
to
be
seen in the scatological Cantos. "Inhuman brutality" too strong a
description for what the toughness, the coarseness, the lack of some–
thing, comes to be?-Consider the attitude that Pound found himself
able to take toward the systematic, and unspeakably atrocious, doing
to death of the Jews of Europe. The spectacle of Pound's degeneration
is a terrible one, and no one ought to pretend that is anything but what
it is.
And this painfully limited mind, which does not know what a
civilization is, and can suppose that to appreciate the best poems in
a language you need only know as much of the language as the poems
contain, is credited (see the essays in Mr. Peter Russell's collection) with
having created a modern epic: "No one ever knew his own mind more
clearly," says Mr. Hugh Kenner. "Indeed the didactic gestures emerge
naturally from the store-house of volitional forms...." The poet of the
Cantos "knows his own mind" clearly in the sense that what his tech–
nique is devoted to conveying is nothing substantially more than what,
at the platform level, the didactic, conscious will dictates. And that con–
fident domineering didactic consciousness is not the servant of any vital
underlying theme, or of any rich sense of positive life. Mr. Eliot said the
damning thing about Pound's moral inspiration when he remarked
that Pound's hells "are for the other people." What comes
up
from
below is hatred and the will to reduce life to what can give excuse for
hatred and contempt and disgust. (Pound, like Eliot, dislikes Lawrence
and is drawn to Wyndham Lewis-who also dislikes Lawrence.) What–
ever the intensity of "art" represented by the Cantos, the effect, for all
the famous skill and variety of versification, is barrenness and monotony.
Mauberley
stands alone-a great poem; the art there
is
creative, the
expression of a young, strong, generous and still sensitive mind.
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