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PARTISAN REVIEW
shaping: as the Scholastics put it, the
forma agens,
not the
forma acta."
Thus, Panofsky says, "a smith shapes his beautiful handiwork accord–
ing
to
the
huon concetto,
and God's thoughts which must be venerated
and cherished in His 'works of art,' the countenances of beautiful
human beings, are called
divin concetti."
Upward's notion of
idea
would support the distinction proposed by Kermode some years ago in
The Sense of an Ending
between fiction and myth . Myth was used as a
term of rebuke because it referred to perceptions and motives so
congealed from long, repetitive use that they no longer retain a breath
of the imagination: anti-Semitism, for instance, is a myth. Fiction is a
term of praise because it is something we know by, rather than
something we act upon. We do not delude ourselves into thinking our
fictions true, therefore we do not put them into practice; we merely use
them as a form of imagination and knowledge. Fictions are good and
pure because we keep them to the realm of possibility, within the
parentheses of artistic form, they are that-which-is-not-yet, and that is
their saving grace.
Why does it matter? Well, Davie has an interest in preventing the
reader from taking Pound's
Cantos
as a sequence of versified ideas in
the normal sense: conceptual slabs laid end to end, "ideas" about usury,
anti-Semitism, good and bad government, and so forth.
If
we think of
ideas in that sense, the
Cantos
are found to swarm with ideas, most of
them deplorable. So long as we deal with the poem in that way, we find
in it only fixities , myths in Kermode's sense, gross blocks of attitude
and conviction. The point is that when Pound calls upon ideas as the
appearances of things already there, his will usurps the rights of his
imagination, and he becomes a politician. There are good fixities as
well as bad fixities, but most of the fixities in the
Cantos
are bad,
morally corrupt. Davie wants to make the reader sensitive to ideas in
Upward's sense, the imagination of a thing not yet there.
It
is clear that
Davie thinks the
Cantos
valuable only for that imagination, and that
the malignant fixities are an embarrassment: he finds poetry in the
forma agens,
not the
forma acta.
The n ew book has a chapter on "Ideas
in the
Cantos,"
and another on "Rhythms in the
Cantos."
In fact, ideas
and rhythms, in the sense sponsored by Upward, are virtually indistin–
guishable, or distinguishable only in theory. Rhythms are the move–
ment of ideas. Ideas are recognized only in their movement; unlike
anti-Semitism, they do not lie congealed on the page.
Motif
is the word
Davie uses to show the movement of ideas in practice throughout the
poem: this enables him to say that "the catching up and echoing-over
intervals of sometimes many hundred verse lines, sometimes only a few
