350
FRANK KERMODE
once observed, "even aesthetic systems may breed a disposition towards
the world and take overt effect." Yeats is our first example of that
correlation between early modernist literature and authoritarian poli–
tics which
is
more often noticed than explained: totalitarian theories
of form matched or reflected by totalitarian politics.
Another celebrated example of this correlation is Ezra Pound.
I can't say much here about this complex and bewildering case, but
Pound does seem to be an instance of a poet's failure to see that
a poetic regress toward paradigms of justice may be carried on with–
out losing touch with the
lingua franca,
whereas any similar political
regress involves immeasurable horror and debasement as well as a
loss of reality. To break the set of an inadequate poetic language, to
destroy the bonds which tie poetry to a discredited logic, may be
tasks calling for new fictions severe and defiant as Pound's pseudo–
ideogram. This is a radical reorientation of poetry, an attempt in the
Last Days to provide a language of renovation. There is disagreement
as to whether this reorientation was well enough executed, sufficiently
self-consistent, to achieve what was necessary, the transmission of
information by codes only speculatively within access of the reader.
But whether the attempt succeeded or not, it could not, in any ordi–
nary sense of the words, be called wrong or dangerous. What is, in
this sense, wrong and dangerous is the belief, gratefully learned by
fascism from the innocent Pragmatists, that fictions are to be justified
or verified by their pragmatic effects. Thus the world is changed to
conform with a fiction, as by the murder of Jews. The effect is to
insult reality, and to regress to myth.
In
medieval apocalyptic move–
ments it was usual to identify the Jews as the demonic host of the
prophecies (much the same thing had happened earlier in North
Africa to the Christians, and can happen to any alien minority of
somewhat mysterious habits). The destruction of the demonic host
must precede more positive eschatological benefits. A poet's anti–
Semitism, a poet's eugenics, may therefore connect him not only with
the debased pragmatism of men he ought to despise, but with a crude
primitivism of the sort he would never consciously regard as relevant
to his own more refined regress. Pound's radio talks were no doubt
the work of a man who had lost some of the sense of reality; but
above all they represented a failure of what I have called clerical
skepticism, and a betrayal rather than a renovation of the tradition
