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works in his favor with a generation of critics for whom history is still essen–
tially bunk . I suspect, however , that the chief reason is that Pound embodies
modernism for us. It is difficult to like him , impossible not to admire him . As
critic , poet, and propagandist for the art he believed in , he was a remarkably
generous man. The difficulty he presents comes only after one recognizes that
the sources of his politics are also the sources of his innovative power as a poet.
Pound twisted everything to his own use. This is , of course , what poets have
done down through the ages , but what Pound twisted was not the shape of
style, but the shape of history . One of the reasons Mr. Chace 's book is so
refreshing is that he recognizes this . " The single greatest difficulty in Pound's
work is one of order , not of all usion . "
Because he is willing to take both of these poets on their own terms ,
Chace demonstrates that Pound 's fascism does not represent an abberation in
an otherwise aesthetically anchored literary career. Pound 's political attitudes
remain central to his poetic imagination . Both he and Eliot were , as Chace
puts it, "entangled in , even obsessed by , politics ." And to examine the
political-literary relationship in their work is to see that work as we do not
really wish to see it. The result is singularly depressing . For Pound and Eliot
seem to have extended what Trotsky once called "the plot mentality of
history" into an aesthetic order all its own.
Perhaps what is most interesting about Pound' s political ideas is the
effort his critics have made to separate the politics from the poetry. The poetry
promised liberation , the politics extinction. And this still remains the case .
While reading this book , I happened to speak to aJewish-American poet who
argued that Pound was not really an anti-Semite at all . I could , of course , have
shown him the lines in
The Cantos ,
the passages in
Guide to Kulchur,
the
transcripts of Pound's Italian radio broadcasts during the war. I could have
quoted chapter and verse, but probably to no avail. When applied to artists
and writers , the tolerance of intolerance remains a potent legacy. Making it
new is still more imperative than making it human .
Pound 's was an essentially reactionary temperament , linked to a
crotchety suspicion of the democratic ethos . The adoration of the strong man
that led him to Mussolinni is visible in a " Leftist" writer like Steffens , who
can move from Lenin to Henry Ford to Hitler without even pausing to catch
his breath . Otwell told us more than we want to know about the intellectual's
love of power. (It is , I suspect, the chief reason behind Orwell 's present lack of
popularity .) Because the poet tends to see his craft as the heart of culture , his
"is the true voice of feeling and health in any culture. As a corollary, the
strong poet looks with admiration to the strong leader. The muse is quickened
as much by authority as by beauty . "
For all of his pedagogical plumbing , Pound possessed a smalltown
