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PARTISAN REVIEW
tent that he is unwilling or unflble to be conscious of experience. There
were splits of sensibility before the seventeenth century-St. Augustine
and his time are classic examples. The Romantic poets healed a split
in
sensibility, even though they made a new one. The same may be
said of Whitman (Lawrence's main point in
Studies in Classic American
Literature).
The poet's duty when such a split occurs should be exer–
cised through "the enjoyable admission of our own dialectic," says Miss
Nott, rather than by retiring "upon the charity of some system which
will give him intellectual food and shelter for the rest of his days" or
by beginning with the assumption that the dissociated sensibility is the
punishment for our Original Sin.
Miss Nott does indeed summon us to enjoyment, though she seems
prepared to allow us to be sad. Her remarks on the relation of charity,
as Christ understood it, to pleasure and truth are simple but profound.
In his understanding of human beings, Christ's intellectual appeal was
to experience and history. Mr. Eliot tries to base his idea of a Christian
society on the abstract notion of man's sinfulness, forgetting that the
root facts of any modern social thinking are the typists and clerks and
so on whom he once saw in the waste land and forgetting, too, the no–
torious alliance in the contemporary world of absolute abstraction and
violence. Miss Nott's ultimate moral objection to the neo-orthodox is
that as dogmatists and authoritarians they are "at heart ... concerned
not with charity but with power." We know that power has its place
in the world, that society is impossible without it. But we also know
that in its public expressions it as easily destroys as enhances the free
operation of the mind and the significant use of language.
Richard Chase
SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY
THE TRANSLATIONS OF EZRA POUND. With on introduction
by
Hugh
Kenner. New Directions. $6.00.
That Pound is a bad translator, that he quite simply does
not always know the meanings of the words which he is englishing, is,
I take it, an open secret; yet Mr. K enner, who provides an introduction
for the present selection from a lifetime of Pound's work, plays games
with himself and with us about the poet's errors, telling us, for instance,
that when Pound translates " eorthan rices" (earthly kingdoms) as
"earthen riches," this is no slip but a "sort of pun" with "a slightly
wrong meaning but a completely right feeling." Mr. Kenner has his
