376
STEPHEN SPENDER
There died a myriad,
And of the best among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilisation.
Their poetry exalted the past which they had sought among the
Georgian poets and found only embalmed in museums, and it derided
the present, the decay of standards. They were, politically, Don
Quixotes of the new world armed to rescue the Dulcinea of the old–
an old hag. The aim of their polemical criticism was to reinvent the
past, shining and modern, and use it as a modern weapon against the
arsenals of the dead men stuffed with straw.
Their politics were secondary to the creative and critical attempt.
In them, they were drawn to whatever points of view presented social
and economic problems as metaphors for their idea of the state of
civilization. The appeal of politics in the guise of metaphor is curiously
shown in the great attraction-which can only be compared with that
of Donne's ideas about time--of Social Credit theories for a number
of writers, including not only Eliot and Pound but also Edwin Muir–
during the late twenties and thirties. Social Credit is easy to visualize.
One sees objects of value being produced on one side of a chart and
on the other side money-credit-being printed equal to the value
of the objects. Since Schacht and Mussolini actually made adjustments
to the German and Italian economies along similar lines, Social Credit
seemed to be an idea which could be abstracted from the rest of
Fascism and applied to other systems. For reactionaries who could not
swallow violence, it was a kiild of Fascism without tears.
Students of Ezra Pound's
Cantos
will observe how metaphors of
this kind drawn from a reading of economics imagized and then ap–
plied to describe the state of the civilization are used by Pound, some–
times
to justify inhuman attitudes. A famous example
is
the passage
about usury in which Pound explains that the introduction of usury
into the economic system falsifies the line drawn by the painter, causes
his hand to err. This justifies a massacre of Jews.
The Left also of course had their metaphors, which by making
history appear a poetic act tended to regard human beings as words
to be acted upon, deleted if necessary, so that the poem might come
right.
In fact, on a level of false rhetoric, so far from there being a
separation of politics from poetry, there is a dangerous convergence.
Marxism, because it regards history as malleable material to be
