BOOKS
POETRY AND POLITICS
THE POLITICAL IDENTITIES OF EZRA POUND AND
1 .S.
ELIOT.
By
William M. Chace. Stanford University Press. $8.95.
To speak about a writer's politics is to run a dual risk : on the one
hand, the temptation to deny the centrality of politics to the work of art; on
the other, the temptation to judge the artist by his politics. The state assimi–
lates; the writer is left to worship. Not a particularly encouraging situation.
" In the economy of art, " wrote Trotsky , "as in the economy of nature ,
nothing is lost, and everything is connected to the large." Unfortunately , that
everything
blankets the writer, too . The political vision may be massive ,
undigested , irritating, and intrusive, but there is no way the writer can avoid
it. Not, at least , in our century.
On the whole, the politics of the major literary modernists makes for
depressing reading . Authoritarianism has rarely found itself in such respect–
able company. The democratic temperament is swallowed up by the presence
of democratic man, that most" average" creature. The " lower middle class
society ," which Eliot so desperately wanted to keep under control , is not
significantly different from the "wad" Mailer scorns. Positions shift, atti–
tudes remain. The Left wards off its demons through its glorification of blacks
and something called "Third World Peoples" ; the Right through its worship
of manners and styles which are banal when they are not simply evil. And the
critic , nervously left to guard the gates of art, is afraid that to subject the
politics of the modernists to close scrutiny becomes, in effect, a statement
about modernism itself, as those who objecred to Pound 's receiving the
Bollingen Prize instinctively understood .
Of all of the modernists, Eliot's politics have been most open to ques–
tion . Perhaps this is because Pound's politics are so patently half-baked (even
the sympathetic critic can only stand bewildered before a mind capable of
equating Mussolini with Jefferson and Christ), perhaps because of guilt over
Pound's incarceration in St. Elizabeth 's in which the roles of victim and
viccimizerwere reversed. Even Pound's naked political stupidity-for a poet
so overwhelmingly concerned with history he was blind to historical reality-
