Pound’s Modernism

a sequel in history
A study of literary trends of the first half of the twentieth century is bound to uncover changes of

sensibility in art inextricably linked to adjustments in the sciences. The shifts in modern sensibility

and the ensuing confusion and debate about matters aesthetic, the large and dogmatic

pronouncements of revolutionary groups all over the world, and the growing awareness that all such

changes and thrusts for change were somehow interdependent, have prompted an uninterrupted

flow of concerns and analysis. Early analysis endeavoured to identify with precision the haphazard

connections between art and science while, contrary to the critical practice of the nineteenth-

century, it generally desisted from attempting to account for the nature and status of the arts and

sciences as independent bodies. Theories appearing in the early twentieth century did not put

emphasis on the harmonisation of the extant, mixed responses in sensibility, but instead revealed

the differences and the causes for difference; making, if at all possible, a virtue of the contrast.

As T. H. Gibbons has shown, the historical accounts of authors à cheval between the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries conveyed a definite sense of deterioration in Western civilisation. Works like

Spengler's The Decline of the West and the widely-read Degeneration by Max Nordau are proof to

such assertion. 1

1 It is perhaps too adventurous to write off this rich period of philosophical debate and speculation with just that assertion. The tension
between those who accepted the notion of decadence in culture and those who opposed it through a scientific approach to history like
Karl Lamprecht or Johan Huizinga or, earlier still, François Guizot, was not resolved. However, the overwhelming pessimism of eminent
figures like Jacob Burckhardt was ushered in the new century, after one hundred years of upheavals and revolutions in the political and
social history of Europe. All in all, the early emphasis was on turning the tables to allow a fresh start or, at least, to welcome a new era
which would prove spiritually energising. The Theosophists, under whose influence W. B. Yeats was to come, eagerly incorporated a
vision of decaying generations within the universal plan which would bear in this 'sixth epoch' of global development the better fruits of
both individuality and commonalty. The trend was towards an adjustment of values without the struggle of revolution, something which
was of interest to the young Pound. A new politics based on global integration was already felt as the subsequent step in cultural
development. Rudolf Steiner in a lecture given in Munich on December 4, 1909 said: "What is entering humanity through the
anthroposophical movement concerns every human being regardless of race or nationality. This movement speaks only to the new
humanity, the new human being – not to an abstract concept 'human being,' but to every individual. This is the essential point." In The
Universal Human, Anthroposophic Press, U.S.A., p. 18. It is in this spirit that Yeats will welcome the writings of Rabindranath Tagore and
place them at the forefront of a renewal of ancient and universal sensibility. In his introduction (pp. xvi-xvii) to Tagore's Gitanjali he wrote:
"A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination; and yet we are not
moved because of its strangeness, but because we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rossetti's willow woods or
heard, for the first time in literature, our voice as in a dream."
In literature, Symbolism picked up the scraps of a decadent sentiment which in England had

inspired the pre-Raphaelites 2 and in France some of the self-pitying gestures of Alfred de Musset.

Symbolism steers clear of such heaviness while attempting to transcend what was thought to be

language's limiting condition as an art medium. If the Pre-Raphaelites (and some of the first poetic

attempts by Pound) evidenced a concern for the reflection of elementary colour and mythical image

(the latter especially in Pound) into the cast of the poetic line, 3 the symbolist, for his part, having

accepted the limitations of human experience, attempts a jump into a metalanguage of sorts.

Tzvetan Todorov has traced the birth of the symbol as a sign in the history of literature and believes

that it remains the greatest attribute of Romantic aesthetics. He proposes two general

characteristics to define both symbol and allegory. Firstly, he claims a fundamental unity in the

nature of what is achieved by both devices: "Symbol and allegory are characterised by a re-union of

opposites ... the opposites can be found in harmonious agreement with each other or else be co-

present in their essential irreducibility." Secondly, he speaks of what 'follows from' such fundamental

unity in terms of an aesthetic response; he writes: "From this first characteristic follows a second

one which does no longer concern the synthetism particular to one or the other but the fact of it

being a state of perpetual becoming." 4 It is this second characteristic which appears most in tune

2 Amy Kahrman Huseby and Heather Bozant Witcher provide a clear definition of what the Pre-Raphaelite movement stood for ahead of
their forthcoming book Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (Palgrave Macmillan 2020). They write: “This specially commissioned edited
collection seeks to define Pre-Raphaelite poetics. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of nineteenth-century poets, artists, and critics who
sought to reform art—broadly construed—by rejecting academic and mechanistic approaches. They reach back to the Romantic poets,
particularly William Blake and John Keats, and their influence can be felt on Aesthetes and Decadents, such as Oscar Wilde, Aubrey
Beardsley, Ernest Dowson, and William Butler Yeats. Scholarship has established the characteristic elements of Pre-Raphaelite visual
and material arts, but we have not codified the methods, forms, and commonalities that constitute literary Pre-Raphaelitism. Pre-
Raphaelite poetry has not yet shaken off its reputation as a “fleshly,” self-indulgent school popularizing the notion of “art for art’s sake.”
This reputation unfairly limits Pre-Raphaelite studies, marginalizing an influential poetic movement. By locating literary Pre-Raphaelitism
as a central poetic moment in the 1850s-1900s, our collection provides a critical overview of the scope and diversity of the Pre-
Raphaelites, who were deeply invested in reshaping the nineteenth-century literary and artistic marketplace.”

3 Poems like 'The Tree' or 'De Aegypto' reflect more intently the characteristics I am referring to and already augur a preference for the
elemental as against abstraction in attempting the recreation of states of deep subjectivism. The affinity with Pre-Raphaelite taste I point
to here was acknowledged indirectly by Pound through many of his scattered critical writings. It is in this allegiance to the elementary
quality of both the "Italian primitives" and the mythical images conveyed that Pound was to find a taste for 'hardness' he would come to
praise in Théophile Gautier, Lionel Johnson and in Dante G. Rosetti's translations of Homer and the Italian poets. Cristoph de Nagy
traces back to Gautier in France and Rossetti in England the theory "according to which poetry must be free from all positivistic
knowledge, from religious or political discussion, and must not be written with a view to altering anything in the world." He goes on to say:
"The formulation of this theory was carried out most convincingly by Walter Pater in his aesthetic writings and in some of the essays of W.
B. Yeats ..." The Poetry of Ezra Pound: The Pre-Imagist Stage, Francke Verlag, Bern, 1968, p. 29.

4 Todorov, T, Théories du symbole, Éditions du Seuil, Paris,1977, p. 257. My translation of Todorov’s: « Symbole et allégorie se
caractérisent par une réunion des contraires... les contraires peuvent être harmonieusement accordés ou bien coprésents dans leur
with the concerns of a group of poets who were to borrow the word 'symbol' to define a marked

tendency in their literary production. Such 'perpetual becoming' does not only imply a 'temporal

dimension' as pointed out by Todorov but, as he also points out, a dimension of transmutation and

perpetuation which the Romantics had sought in poetics and the Symbolists would look for within

language itself. When Rimbaud writes in the famous 'Bateau Ivre',

I've dreamt the green night of dazzling snows,

Kisses slowly reaching the eyes of seas

The unheard saps in flow

And the wake, yellow and blue, of singing phosphori. 5

he is not only combining sensations and ideas in his poetry, he is undoing the traditional coherence

of images whilst keeping to a grammar which remains overtly correct. The problem for the reader is

not to have "neiges éblouies" in their present form, since both noun and adjective fulfil their

syntactical functions without flaw; the disparity arises from the fact that few would have dared such

a psychologically distant association in a poem. Inasmuch as the image demands of the reader a

leap into the subjective imagination, and inasmuch as it does so successfully through fidelity to an

orthodox syntax and (in this case) metre, it can be argued that Rimbaud is working to enlarge the

confines of language. In this sense, he is the precursor of poets like St. John Perse whose poetry

dwells in that characteristic, making it a solid base for a new aesthetics which will question the
6
acquired values of the French language. The transcendence implied here is the first reaction

irréductibilité essentielle. De cette première caractéristique en découle une seconde, qui concerne non plus le synthétisme propre à l'un
ou à l'autre, mais le fait d'être un état de perpétuel devenir. »

5 My translation of Rimbaud’s:

« J'ai rêvé la nuit verte aux neiges éblouies,

Baisers montant aux yeux des mers avec lenteur,
La circulation des sèves inouies
Et l'éveil jaune et bleu des phosphores chanteurs »
6 In a letter to Archibald MacLeish dated December 23, 1941, Perse provides an example which clarifies the basis of such new aesthetic.
After describing the French language as 'the only imaginable fatherland' he writes in parentheses: “In a small Polynesian island under
English protectorate, where the French flag had not been seen since the times of Louis-Philippe, I once was asked to listen, in French, to
a scene of Esther whose verses had been patiently rehearsed for eight days under the direction of an old Saint-Paul de Chartres’ nun by
young Tongan girls who were unable to understand a single word of what they recited. Never has Racine been less betrayed, and never
have I understood better the miracle of this French tongue whose magical power is often disregarded in favour of its analytical genius.”
My translation of Perse’s: « Dans une petite île de Polynésie sous protectorat anglais, où l'on n'avait pas vu le pavillon français depuis le
temps de Louis-Philippe, on m'a fait entendre un jour, en français, une scène d''Esther' dont les vers avaient été patiemment répétés,
against a return to the purely Romantic in poetry, that is, a refusal to acknowledge form, however
7
effective, as the sole medium for poetic expression. The symbolist poet, like Pound, adapts the

contradictions met in daily life to the requirements of a unifying creative urge. Therefore, it is with

this group of poets that we first encounter clues to a formal acknowledgment of the division between

language and reality at a creative level.

The symbolist movement gathered its first adepts with Jean Moréas's publication of his Manifeste

du Symbolisme in 1886 to further complicate a transition in matters aesthetic that would have well-

known poets like Yeats and Mallarmé introduce the notion of modernity to a new generation of
8
writers. Such a notion, though not entirely sound (infused as it was with a mixture of both romantic

and classicist elements), carries with it nevertheless the seeds of change which will ultimately

sustain a variety of voices identified by the collective efforts of what has been called the vanguard

literature of the early twentieth-century. Vicente Gaos has written in this context:

In Europe, and mostly in France, new winds are blowing. The expression 'vanguard art' conveys
accurately the combative attitude of its spokes-people. The movement splits into numerous "isms":
after Italian Futurism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism appear in France, Adamism or Acmeism in

pendant huit jours, par une très vieille religieuse française de Saint-Paul de Chartres, à des jeunes filles tongiennes incapables de
comprendre un mot de ce qu'elles récitaient: Jamais Racine n'a été moins trahi, et jamais je n'ai mieux compris le miracle de cette langue
française, dont le pouvoir magique est trop souvent méconnu au profit de son génie analytique. »

7 Again, de Nagy's study of the young Pound becomes useful. Pound could accept and even praise D. G. Rossetti's translations of
Cavalcanti but found a defect in them; they lacked the "robustezza", the "masculinity" he found in the original. De Nagy shows first (p. 53)
Pound's affinities with his peers in order to then point out a fundamental difference: “For the young Pound, too, poetry is meant to
incarnate "Beauty". But this beauty is more than merely beauty of form. It is, unlike the beauty of Morris, Walter Pater or Oscar Wilde,
embedded in a spiritual reality; in the act of creation the poet is 'possessed', moved by a divine power -- similar to the Platonistic -
Romantic conception, and here Pound is still fairly close to Yeats. However, in his own case Pound does not feel 'possessed' by the
Muse of Plato's 'Ion' or by some anonymous spiritual power, rather in a very concrete manner by the great poets of the past. This is one
of the central and unique ideas in Pound's poetics which he owes to no one.”

8 In the first page of his Preface to the volume French Symbolisme and the Modernist Movement, Louisiana State University Press, Baton
Rouge, 1980, John Porter Houston provides this reference to Moréas' manifesto introducing a study which owes much to Pound's critical
acknowledgment of authors (i.e. Jules Laforgue and Gustave Flaubert) and of aesthetic categories. Porter Houston writes on page x: "As
a matter of fact, we shall find that there are at least two kinds of symbolism in modern poetry; the use of the word in one special sense is
sanctioned by Mallarmé and William Butler Yeats; in another it designates a more or less definable meaning beyond the literal and is
related thereby to the higher tradition of allegory." Pound had written in a letter to Dorothy Shakespear from Stone Cottage in 1914: “What
do you mean by symbolism? Do you mean real symbolism, Cabala, genesis of symbols, rise of picture language, etc. or the aesthetic
symbolism of Villiers de L'Isle Adam, & that Arthur Symons wrote a book about - the literwary movement? ... There's a dictionary of
symbols, but I think it immoral. I mean that I think a superficial acquaintance with the sort of shallow, conventional, or attributed meaning
of a lot of symbols weakens - damnably, the power of receiving an energized symbol.” Quoted in James Longenbach's 'The Secret
Society of Modernism: Pound, Yeats, Olivia Shakespear, and the Abbé de Montfaucon de Villars', Yeats Annual nº 4, 1986, p. 104.
 Russia, Imagism in England (and the United States) and Ultraism and Creationism in Spain (and
Latin-America).

The common denominator underlying all these tendencies does not exclude large doses of
contradiction and confusion. Literature surrenders to a continuous exercise in creative experiments
9
which coexist or are superseded rapidly.

The eighteenth century brought with it the age of enlightenment; the nineteenth century attempted

to put into practice such intellectual attainment, or, as Porter Houston has it, it was "a time when the
10
practical aesthetics of poets and novelists were both abundantly recorded and highly significant".

The twentieth century, for its part, seems to have acknowledged, after several decades of

protracted battle, its indefinite status as a 'bewildered' era. Positivist concepts which found their
11
authority in what could be called the long tradition of French scepticism still enjoy today 'the

benefit of the doubt' at the most visible levels of life and government. Technology usurps the pre-

eminence of science only while the latter woos its strongly sensitised philosophical opponents in the

aftermath of the atomic bomb inferno. Representative democracy follows the inroads made by the

long-lasting European tradition of imperialism to reconquer, economic factors allowing, the lands

and peoples these empires lost after the successful independence movements of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Susan George has predicted, the next century might be

9 Gaos, Vicente, Antología del grupo poético de 1927, Cátedra, Madrid, 1992, pp. 16-17. My translation of Gaos’: “En Europa, en Francia
sobre todo, soplan aires nuevos. La expresión arte de "vanguardia" expresa bien la actitud combativa de sus corifeos. El movimiento se
escinde en numerosos "ismos": tras el futurismo italiano vienen cubismo, dadaísmo, surrealismo, en Francia; adanismo o acmeísmo, en
Rusia; imaginismo, en Inglaterra (y en los Estados Unidos); ultraísmo y creacionismo, en España (y en Hispanoamérica). El común
denominador que subyace en el fondo de todas estas tendencias no excluye buena dosis de contradicción y de confusión. La literatura
se entrega a un continuo ejercicio de experimentos creadores que coexisten en pugna o se suceden rápidamente.” Also at this time, the
Chinese, through contacts facilitated by their overseas students (Sun Yat-sen attended University in Hawaii and travelled extensively in
Europe), were organising the transition from a traditional form of education based in the study and appreciation of Classical Chinese to a
system of instruction based on Western standards and the adoption of the spoken (everyday) language bai hua 白話 as the medium for
academic learning. They abolished their system of central examinations based on the study and commentary upon the Classics to
introduce Western style syllabi in their schools. The Japanese, more advanced in this respect, were already carrying out an active search
for new trends in literature, with a growing emphasis on Westernisation. It is worth mentioning that Ernest F. Fenollosa, whose influence
was so great on Pound, was to promote a movement back to the traditional arts of Japan by being the first among foreign experts in that
country to compare favourably native art with that of the West.

10 Houston, J. P., French Symbolism and the Modernist Movement: A Study of Poetic Structures, Louisiana State University Press,
Baton Rouge, 1980, p. 6.

11 Mainstream philosophers of France have often made a claim to scepticism in different forms. Montaigne developed his thoughts from
an agnostic stance, Descartes based his conclusions on the method of systematic doubt and Pascal applied an apologetic scepticism in
his philosophical researches.
one dominated by the term 'biological'. 12 Technology will no doubt thrive, since the current stress

on biological alternatives has evolved from an improved capacity to tamper with natural resources.

In many respects, George's 'biological' era might prove to be the last échelon in the positivistic

movement started by Auguste Comte with his physique sociale, a science which induced a drop of

popular interest in theological and metaphysical philosophy through the concept of "natural
13
superiority".

In the arts, as in the sciences, the debate continues. Freedom of association and a growing concern

about the results offered by the statistical output of the social sciences seem to monopolise the

creativity of contemporary artists. Within the rich framework of the twentieth century's artistic

experience, the early revolutionary movements supported by writers, painters, musicians and

sculptors alike, have given way, through the pangs of an existentialism corroborated by the

momentous events of two successive world wars and enhanced communication technology, to the

emergence of new art forms and the dilation of the Kingdom of Art into a commonality of artistic

practices. Criticism and performance among others have been acclaimed as arts in their own right;

their practitioners are 'artists' and call themselves so. The early twentieth century became the stage

upon which these newly recognised arts played their most important roles. But the source of this

recognition was a fruitful exchange among artists in all disciplines. Direct identification and a greater

humility on the part of the painters and the poets of this period were the signs highlighting the

12 The following comparison offered by George at the end of the first Chapter of her book The Debt Boomerang: How Third World Debt
Harms Us All, Pluto Press, 1992 illustrates accurately the plight to which governments and individuals around the world must awake
sooner or later. She writes: “Humans -- and their governments -- tend to react to events, not processes -- to Bhopals, to Chernobyls, to
invasions but not to the long histories that made such disasters possible. Biologists know the experiment in which a frog is placed in a
beaker of very hot water. Wisely, it jumps out. But if the frog is placed in a beaker of cold water which is then slowly heated to boiling
point, it will remain there and, if no one intervenes, be boiled alive because nature has not equipped it to sense small gradations of
temperature. Since public opinion does have its froglike attributes, we may end up thanking -- after a fashion -- Saddam Hussein for
shaking us out of our complacency on energy policies.”

13 Comte, Auguste, Cours de Philosophie Positive, Leçon 1, Garnier, Paris, 1922, p. 43-48. Comte explains the historical progression of
science in the following terms: "Now that the human mind has founded celestial physics, Earth physics both mechanical and chemical;
organic physics both vegetal and animal, it still has the task to complete the system of the sciences based on observation by founding
social physics. This is nowadays, according to various leading reports, the greatest and most pressing need of our intelligence: this is, I
dare say, the first aim of this course; its special aim." My translation of Comte’s: « Maintenant que l'esprit humain a fondé la physique
céleste, la physique terrestre, soit mécanique, soit chimique; la physique organique, soit végétale, soit animale, il lui reste à terminer le
système des sciences d'observation en fondant la physique sociale. Tel est aujourd'hui, sous plusieurs rapports capitaux, le plus grand et
le plus pressant besoin de notre intelligence : tel est, j'ose le dire, le premier but de ce cours, sont but spécial. » Although the social
sciences were the obvious outcome of such assumptions, consideration of social problems has been at the root of the intensification in
the search for biological such as GM foods and technology (automation/robotics) solutions which might provide workable answers for
large-scale issues pressing on our world today.
growing importance of performance within the arts. Naomi Ritter has developed this topic in her

book Art as Spectacle. Speaking of Guillaume Apollinaire's 'Un Fantôme de Nuées' (1911) and of

Rainer Maria Rilke's ‘Fifth Duino Elegy’ (1922) with reference to Pablo Picasso's painting 'Les

Saltimbanques' (1905) she concludes:

Both poems give us street circuses, with similar personnel. At the center of both shows and the
painting, we find a 'magical' boy, whose innocent grace redeems the suffering of his peers.
Furthermore, the ritual-like act of Apollinaire's boy and the paradoxical smile of Rilke's child symbolize
the salvation of the audience too. Both poems close with an epiphany of universal import .... Rilke's
last strophe, with its image of a triumphant posthumous spectacle, also connotes the salvation of
humanity through art. Here we find the deepest common meaning in the two poems. Creation
demands suffering, but it may unite and redeem mankind. Art requires the miracle of the uniquely
14
blessed poet, yet, paradoxically, it belongs to us all.

Since then, the cinema, video, gaming and virtual reality have unfolded their ‘screens’ to enrich the

imagination of artists and others alike. The 'seventh art' demands a preeminent status as the mirror

of society while providing the world with an effective system of symbols and psychological

reflections that upstages the role of social insurgence by means of ever-expanding technology

whose psychological and social consequences we are still researching. Within the arts, and

corresponding to the shift in scientific awareness, the time previously allotted for reflection has been

employed by an adamant creative individualism to furnish the modern artistic stage with a collection

of stylised fixtures. In the gap inflicted by such cacophony of voices to the traditional continuum, the

apparatuses have reduplicated, making time a slave to busyness and pushing the human mind

away from its contemplative capacities.

14 Ritter, Naomi, Art as Spectacle: Images of the Entertainer since Romanticism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1989, p. 176.
Pound himself was not immune to this influence and wrote one of his most successful pieces of poetry on the subject of a per ambulant
circus crew. 'The Gypsy' (1912) provides the reader with a remarkable distinctness both of colour and disposition in the description of an
exotic character. The encounter of the itinerant poet and the wayfaring Gypsy is rendered inimitably in the lines:
-- A brown upstanding fellow

Not like the half-castes,

up on the wet road near Clermont.
The wind came, and the rain,

And mist clotted about the trees in the valley,

And I'd the long ways behind me,
grey Arles and Biaucaire,
Modernism has now been displaced by substitutes that claim a fresh evaluation of artistic

phenomena; structuralism, psychologism, and deconstruction, post-modernism, feminism, post-

colonialism and the return to theory have all made modernism a thing of the past. For the

contemporary writer such a past seems even more remote than the Palaeolithic age, for its causes

are known, its connections to the present remain distinct and the knowledge of such causes

(however superficial) bestows on him or her a licence to forget their true import. Their mere

familiarity makes them transparent and thus conspicuously insignificant. On the other hand,

inasmuch as the ancient past cannot be recollected with precision, it becomes a more alluring

source for research, for recreation, and for the play of the imagination. However much we seem to

have progressed since the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1889, the problems assailing humanity keep

evading solutions, whilst artistic and scientific response continues to provide a divided front to

questions which had already been raised at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Ezra Pound's career might be positioned safely within the above-mentioned parameters of renewal

of the ancient and rejection of what was closer to him. His early revolutionising temperament slowly

gathered more responsibilities than those particular to an uncompromising 'freedom or death'

antagonism. His poetic production and his critical prose are the products of a postulate that

assumes that 'all that I now know should be known by others' and which obviously places enormous

strains on the reader. The difference between Pound and the majority of his contemporaries is that,

in perceiving accurately the complexity needed by a total remodelling of the arts, he chooses to

delve deep in the ancient past and, from there, retrieve the tools – be they literary, political or

economic – to brave the modernist dilemma with the backing of distant authorities.

Martin Kayman has weighed the contribution of Pound's poetics in the context of the philosophical

trends available at the time of his work in England. He makes the point that although "many of the

supports for Pound's poetics come from a series of discoveries made by physics towards the end of

the century", the interpretation of his work by critics like Hugh Kenner and Donald Davie as being

founded in modern science is not entirely accurate. Kayman proposes to include Pound within the

scope of "empiro-criticism", a theory formulated by Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré which posits "a

global system of formal conceived relations, drawn from phenomena, which may be signified by
 15
objects, but which signify concrete active experience." What such a theory appears to predicate is

the dissolution of the duality between objective and subjective discourse in favour of a more

dynamic form of expression based on models that embody 'the process' of all action, like the vortex,

the ideogram or virtù itself. Inasmuch as these models are ever 'contemporary', they provide the

writer a tool with which to reach back into the past and appropriate without further obstruction the

accounts handed down by history. Such appropriation, however, does not remain untouched in its

historical frame but is used as part of a method of inter fertilisation of concepts across time, thus

doing away with constraints formulated by categories and dogma. Examples of obvious

anachronism, like Jean Anouilh's use of modern clothing in his re-writing of Greek mythological

accounts for French audiences, far from remaining at the superficial level of shock, encourage an

active criticism of models which might have been identified for centuries as the causes of social and

political strife. Such a device, Kayman has pointed out accurately, reaches towards an ultimate

universalisation of all phenomena which stems from a latent contradiction between the idealist
16
dream of universality and the traditional scientific dream of objectivity.

17
It is this contradiction that is at the root of what has come to be known as 'the Pound problem'. It

is also the contradiction fundamental to the ongoing state of re-evaluation of the sciences and the

arts on the eve of the social and political changes (two World Wars, the rise and demise of Fascism

and Communism etc.) which have uncovered the present, critical state of human affairs.

Pound was not alone in feeling the tension, but for the most part his contemporaries pushed aside

these preoccupations to adopt some productive stance and did not remain attached to the dream of

arriving at a solution encompassing both artistic and social spheres. Thus, artistic works during the

first quarter of the twentieth century were numerous and of quality, and can be seen to still influence

15 Kayman, Martin, 'Ezra Pound and Science: Phenomenon and History', in Ezra Pound and History, (ed.) Marianne Korn, The National
Poetry Foundation, University of Maine, 1985, pp. 37-51. Kayman also points out that Mach was instrumental in Einstein's diminishing his
'dogmatic faith' in Newtonian mechanics. Moreover, his account is substantiated by the more revolutionary elements of Pound's poetics,
namely, the inversion of the relation between objective and subjective accounts in an effort towards universalisation.

16 Pound always had difficulty adhering to the principles of his own literary manifestos. Though his poetic practice can be said to vary
enormously from that of his predecessors, his critical statements about the requisites of 'good art' are many times unattainable even by
the one who formulated them.

17 There exists a 'pool' of writings which present Pound and his activities as problematic.
greatly the artistic production of the late twentieth century. T. E. Hulme could be incorporated within

the same philosophical category as Pound, though his early death (during the First War) cut short

his career as a philosopher and poet. Hulme's choice of literature for translation and his own

writings in Speculations and Further Speculations reveal a concern for a certain hardness in art,

something he would call the new "classicism" and which gathers many of the attributes Pound
18
chooses to associate with the sculptural model. Hulme was also interested in resolving the

apparent dichotomy between art and science and his attempts were overtly in favour of the latter, as

he saw in science the only effective means of overthrowing the degeneracy of an inherited

"romanticism".

As we have seen previously, the taste for "isms" has not decreased and such denominations do

little to assuage the doubts and fears their claims to singularity have themselves fostered. An
19
example in point is that of deconstruction (ism?) and all the unwonted debate it has prompted.

Earl Miner succeeds in extricating the use of literary cliché from the hardened surface into which

usage itself has embedded it when he writes:

[A]ny close examination of an historical literary abstraction such as "modernism" or "romanticism"

reveals that what has been abstracted is identified for the sake of utility at the price of ignoring all that
differs from the features abstracted. So it is that to some people English romanticism means that

18 It should be noted that many critics have chosen the sculptural element in Pound's poetics as a medium fit to explain the outlines of his
production and to draw a picture of the broad import of the American's overall contribution to literature. Donald Davie's Poet as a Sculptor
and Michael North's 'The Architecture of Memory: The Tempio Malatestiano' are among the best examples of this kind of criticism.
Moreover, the poet's close association with Gaudier-Brzeska, immortalised through the famous busts, reveals a congeniality with an art of
which he was a good appreciator. When Michael Sullivan writes in his An Introduction to Chinese Art, University of California Press, 1961,
p 69: "Indeed we will find throughout the history of Chinese sculpture that the most vital, solidly realized and purely sculptural modelling
was the product of the lowest levels of society, and that by contrast the higher the art the more abstract and linear it becomes", we are
served with clues as to affinities between the Chinese conception of art and Pound's own appreciation of sculpture. Pound writes in his
essay on Brancusi: "... every one of the thousand angles of approach to a statue ought to be interesting, it ought to have a life (Brancusi
might perhaps permit me to say a 'divine life') of its own .... It is also conceivably more difficult to give this formal-satisfaction by a single
mass, or let us say to sustain the formal-interest by a single mass, than to excite transient visual interests by more monumental and
melodramatic combinations." The Literary Essays of E. P., p. 443.

19 Donald Davie has shown in a humorous and sharp essay how much these doubts and fears rely on flawed conceptualisation (and
there lies perhaps the greatest irony) within modern discourse. He writes in the thoroughly enjoyable 'The Franglais of Criticism': “The
matter is really of some importance. In all our talk of 'deconstruction' (and 'deconstructionist'), what of the word's first cousin,
'misconstruction'? My own strong suspicion is that many of those English speakers who toss around 'deconstruction' most blithely
conceive that they are playing games with the English verb 'construct', not with the verb 'construe' .... Again, we mistake, we deliberately
take an expression in a sense possible indeed but in the highest degree implausible, so as to discredit the possibility of any taking that is
not mistaking. In this way we begin to see that mistaking, mistranslating, and misconstruing are at the heart of deconstructionist criticism,
procedures so essential to it that the pejorative implications of the 'mis-' prefix must be systematically eliminated from its (and our)
discourse.” In Comparative Criticism, (ed.) E. S. Shaffer, Cambridge University Press, Vol. 6, 1984, p. 322.
 "healing power" that both Mill and Arnold found in Wordsworth, whereas to the generation of T. E.
Hulme, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound romanticism meant a sapping sense, a sickliness of sensibility. 20

building Renaissance worlds

Pound's revolutionary stance, although difficult to trace in the sinuous turns of its development, is

certainly the thorn he was not able to extract from his side, even with the help of 'the dream come

true' of Mussolini's fascist Italy. Such a stance is at the base of his approval of the writings by

French syndicalist Georges Sorel and, as we will see with Gibbons, of his confidence in a recurrent

("cyclical") pattern of history – a confidence which seemed to Pound the only necessary condition

for affiliating his Cantos with the great epics of the past. Gibbons writes:

Western civilization, Sorel here implies, 21 has reached the stage of ultimate decadence: Vico's
'second barbarism' or 'barbarism of reflection' intellectual stagnation and moral corruption. Syndicalist
violence constitutes a return to the earlier and more virile stage of the 'barbarism of sensation' which
alone is capable of producing a ricorso, an upward movement of the Vichian cycle towards the
primitive human virtues of dignity and nobility. 22

20 Miner, Earl, 'Inventions of Literary Modernity', CLIO, Vol. 21:1, 1991, p. 10. Geoffrey Brereton has also expressed similar views in the
context of French poetry. In his An Introduction to the French Poets he writes: “Beyond a certain point all general classifications break
down. This is because, though useful to delimit certain broad tendencies, they are never exact enough to measure the work of individual
writers. Anyone can see that Racine's verse differs from La Fontaine's, Vigny's from that of both Lamartine and Musset. To call the first
two Classics and the last three Romantics, having first given a definition of Classicism and Romanticism, leads only to the perimeter of
the subject. One might, indeed, establish categories of Classicism and Romanticism to suit each one of these cases, but this would
ultimately mean a new category or sub-category for every existing poet. The chief absurdity of such an approach is in its wastefulness.”
University Paperbacks, Methuen, London, 1956, p. x.

21 Gibbons refers here to Georges Sorel's Réflections sur la Violence, a book published in 1908 and translated by T. E. Hulme in 1916.
Pound had access to the volume.

22 Gibbons, T. H., 'Yeats, Joyce and Eliot: Literary Modernism and the Revival of Cyclical Theories of History, 1880-1945', unpublished
paper given at Melbourne University, The University of Western Australia. Zeev Sternhell has researched with Mario Sznajder and Maia
Asheri the origins of fascist thought. They dedicate a full chapter to Sorel in the book The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural
Rebellion to Political Revolution, (trans.) David Maisel, Princeton University Press, 1994. On page 75 of the book, the authors provide a
description of the ultimate aim of Sorel's work. The description fits well the scope of Pound's own social and political concerns. Some links
to aspects of Confucianism might also be found within Sternhell's outline of Sorel's convictions: ”Sorel was fascinated by Pascal, just as
he was dazzled by Bergsonian spiritualism. Pascal opposed atheism and was enthusiastic about miracles; he was thus held to be the
perfect antibook of Descartes, who cleared "the way for the Encyclopedists in reducing God to very little." At a single stroke, which he
hoped was definitive, Sorel rejected the core of the intellectual heritage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Descartes, Locke,
and Rousseau; rationalism, optimism, the theory of society as a collection of individuals. Sorel detested the atomistic conception of the
individual that had prevailed since the time of Hobbes and Locke. He held it responsible for liberalism, democracy, and denatured
socialism. At the same time, consistent with himself, he deplored the secularization of French life, a process, he said, that would never
have taken place without the slackening of manners and the disappearance of morality.”
This paragraph alone, though not directly concerned with Pound, introduces the major terms of

reference for a sketch of the American's sense of the task at hand. The terms "virile", "ricorso" and

"nobility" are of utmost importance in an analysis of Pound's aesthetic and political stances.

"Virile" is certainly a term which Pound would have approved of, but when we find Allen Upward

expressing his controversial views on etymology (another of Pound's favourite topics) it becomes

possible to understand where Pound found a source of inspiration which filters even through his

prose style. After offering what he believes are the basic etymologies for the English word "very" –

namely 'working' and 'hearing' – Upward writes:

The common term of vrai and verus, I suspect, is not veracus but vir, as man is the common term of
working and hearing. And that sense which I catch faintly breathing in very, like the scent of a flower
lingering in a jar. 23

Pound will search the texts of his favourite writers and commentators for an approximation to "vir".

Dante holds for Pound the exact measure of virtù, which is perhaps one of the few estimations

Pound does not etymologically exaggerate past proportion. The works by Fenollosa and Confucius

also appear to possess the quality which in the essay 'Cavalcanti' Pound terms "an interactive

force", a substance arising "where the thought has its demarcations" and "stupid men have not
24
reduced all 'energy' to unbounded undistinguished abstraction." It remains difficult to ascertain

what for Pound is an abstraction; "interactive force" seems to possess all the qualifications to

deserve the term, yet Pound is unable to avoid it. In a similar way, his explanation of virtù as a

23 Allen Upward, The New Word, An Open Letter addressed to the Swedish Academy in Stockholm on the meaning of the word
IDEALIST, Mitchell Kennerley, New York, MCMX (first published in England 1904), p. 37. Another of Pound's celebrated utterances might
have originated in Upward's writing also. In the 1934 article 'The Teacher's Mission' for the English Journal, Pound writes: "'Artists are the
antennae of the race.' If this statement is incomprehensible and if its corollaries need any explanation, let me put it that a nation's writers
are the voltometers and steam-gauges of that nation's intellectual life." The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, p. 58. In Upward's The Divine
Mystery we read: “The case of the weather-prophet, of course, is not a real exception [to the law of cause and effect]. Neither the thunder
nor the wizard's headache is a cause, but both are symptoms of the unseen electrical tempest. But the savage can only judge by what he
sees. The wizard's premonition comes before the thunder, and so the former seems to be the cause; the latter, the effect. It is well known
that in the present day the traveller's aneroid barometer is believed by his savage porters to cause the storm that it foretells, and receives
worship in consequence.” Allen Upward, The Divine Mystery, A Reading of the History of Christianity down to the Time of Christ, (written
in 1909), Ross-Erikson Inc. Publishers, Santa Barbara, U.S.A., 1976, p. 25. We can almost be certain that Pound borrowed this thought,
inasmuch as, by 1934, Upward's ideas must have been well propagated amongst the group of London writers and such an appropriation
would have been only a matter of acknowledgment. After all, this form of appropriation was the most efficient method Pound was to
employ in the dissemination of new opinions.

24 See Eric Mottram's comparison of Merleau Ponty's phenomenology and Pound's theorising. 'Ezra Pound in his Time', Ezra Pound and
America, (ed.) Jaqueline Kaye, Macmillan, London, 1992, pp. 98-9.
substance within "demarcations" of thought directs us to the ideogrammatic conception of language

and poetry. Here again, the clues are of a mixed nature. Pound provides in the 1936 edition of

Fenollosa's The Chinese Character as a Medium for Poetry an etymology for the Chinese de 德

which remains substantially at odds with that offered in his 1947 edition of Confucius. Though

further study and elucidation might have been the cause behind such changes, one needs to view

Pound's endeavours as careless.

The second term relevant within a Poundian scheme for modernity is "ricorso"; it can be readily

associated with his famous 'Risorgimento' and the wished-for Renaissance of American art which

will ultimately encourage in Pound's mind the bond between Italy, Fascism and 'great art'. In his

1914 essay 'The Renaissance', Pound elaborates on his concern for what seems a delayed

increase in the arts of America. He writes:

Whether from habit, or from profound intuition, or from sheer national conceit, one is always looking to
America for signs of a 'Renaissance'.

And a few pages later:

Democracies have fallen, they have always fallen, because humanity craves the outstanding
personality. And hitherto no democracy has provided sufficient place for such an individuality. If you
endow sculptors and writers you will begin for America an age of awakening which will over-shadow
the quattrocento; because our opportunity is greater than Leonardo's: we have more aliment, we have
not one classic tradition to revivify, we have China and Egypt and the unknown lands lying upon the
roof of the world – Khotan, Kara-shar and Kan-su. 25

Such early antidemocratic statements of intention prepare us for Russell A. Berman's general

conclusion that: "Fascist literature, as rebellious as it may have presented itself to be ... tied
26
modernism ultimately to a cultural conservatism." Although such statement needs to be qualified

in the light of Pound's pluralist attitude to the study of literature and the development of science, it

remains a clear sign of the sorts of methodologies that many Western literati saw fit to endorse in

order to achieve cultural universalism. For Berman, this kind of modernism is flawed by overtly

strong national considerations. In Pound's case, nationalistic considerations were also important,

25 Pound, Ezra, Literary Essays, 'The Renaissance', Faber and Faber, London, 1954, pp. 218 & 224.

26 Berman, Rusell A., Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, (ed.) Monique Chefdor et al., Illinois University Press, 1986, p. 101.
though he always trusted that his love for the United States of America would not be questioned.

Berman writes:

The art work was not the object of aesthetic contemplation but the locus of the generation of a
national project. The recipient ceased to represent an individual sensibility capable of interpretive
activity and disappeared into the mysterious unity of the folk. The fascist work did not produce the
reader in order to provide a consumer of aesthetic pleasure but in order to organize him or her within
the national rebirth. 27

When Pound speaks of an "outstanding personality", he refers to that element which will facilitate, in

Berman's words' "the mysterious unity of the folk". This is a personality with whom the populace will

be able to identify readily. For Pound, such an individual embodies natural leadership and his cult of

Mussolini in later years – the humble teacher, violinist, writer and populist politician – is proof of

such an assertion. Moreover, his use of the Chinese classics and his reverence for the wisdom

recorded there is also in line with a sentiment often recognised by China observers as one of the

general characteristics of the Chinese mind. Pound's own literary life is another example of the

power derived from personality and the strength of cultist methods.

"Nobility" is the third term in our equation. With its mixed ethico-political connotations, it can be

made to qualify Pound's attitude towards the world outside, his solemn disregard of others' opinions

and his capacity for relentlessly surviving any attack with a self-imposed, yet hardly understandable

dignity. Nobility is for Ezra Pound the birth-right of the poet, that is, a feat of sensibility, an

aristocracy of sorts based on knowledge and the cultivation of knowledge. It is based therefore on

the rule of difference and will inspire in a similar manner the pre-Raphaelite period, the journalist at

Orage's New Age, and the fascist Pound in Italy. Seen in such simplistic terms, the progression

27 Berman, p. 97. Sternhell, Sznajder and Asheri conclude their aforementioned book The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural
Rebellion to Political Revolution with the following remarks. Although their analysis seems too clear cut in terms of the host of thinkers
and intellectuals they manage to categorise within two well-defined and opposed ideological camps, their contribution might be helpful in
clarifying certain elementary political mass-reactions characteristic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They write on
page 257: “Here one finds the essential difference between thinkers who recognized the existence of irrational factors and their influence
on society and those who made irrationalism the core of their teaching and an intellectual and political tool to win the support of the
masses. ... This basic conception placed on one side of the fence Heidegger, Spengler, Jünger, the whole German "conservative
revolutionary" school, Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, Eliot, and Yeats and on the other side Husserl, Jaspers, Thomas Mann, and Joyce. This
was the demarcation between Sorel, Barrès, Montherlant, and Brasillach on the one hand and Gide and Anatole France on the other.
They all recognized the importance of irrational factors, they all criticized the existing political and social order, but not all were Fascists or
sympathizers of fascism. Not all criticism of the existing order necessarily develops into fascism; not all sensitivity to the institutional
weaknesses of democracy necessarily leads to a denial of its principles.”
appears to be clear. However, considering the importance that such an attitude would have in

Pound's literary production, the example of a contemporary writer such as Joyce might provide

some needed detail to our analysis.

bastions of Modernism
James Joyce has perhaps been the more successful representative of the modernist group. He was

able to show, like many modernist painters, that he was at home with traditional forms, only to

abandon them, in spite of success, for challenging story-telling methods. Seen in this light, Joyce's

work still strives to provide in his stories what Yeats thought to be a particularly 'mysterious

connection between poetry and magic' in Ireland. Richard Ellmann has shown convincingly through

the use of his characteristic pseudo-biographical method the extent of nationalism as a factor in the

lives of both Yeats and Joyce. Ellmann posits that a clear progression can be traced in the attitudes

and artistic merit of Wilde, Yeats, and Joyce, and that their contributions fall within the scope of a

common literary tradition. In this context their elitism and pre-eminence as acclaimed figures of the

literary world is based mainly on a facility in finding the personal style which will characterise them

unequivocally. Ellmann himself has provided an expressionist description of Joyce's style which

helps us in great measure when invoking possible classifications or schemes for his evolution within

tradition. Ellmann identifies in Joyce's work three basic 'elements of possible relief' against the

prevailing decadence, and goes on to write:

It is as if Joyce were proclaiming that all is chaos, but doing so in heroic couplets. When even the
most mentally impoverished situations are described so deftly, so reservedly, so lyrically, the style
offers the lost rhythms, the missing emotional possibilities, the absent structure. The age weeps, the
rhythm smiles. So as hopes are dashed, enterprises doomed, love unrequited or warped, sympathy,
humor and lyricism keep reminding us that life need not necessarily be so incomplete. 28

Among the host of remarks about Joyce that Pound has left behind in his writings, perhaps the one

which most closely approximates a critique from a mature perspective is that published in The

Criterion in July 1937. There, Pound summons a distinction which might not have been obvious to

28 Ellmann, R., 'The Uses of Decadence', along the riverrun: selected essays, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1989, p. 15.
the critic of his time but which, with the advantage of decades of criticism, we can perhaps

appreciate better. Pound, even when his involvement in political and economic matters precluded

him from an active role in English literary circles, often displayed his acute ability to pinpoint

distinctions and critical trends. Comparing Wyndham Lewis' work to that of Joyce, and swiftly

offering one of his compact lessons in the history of literature, he writes:

The renovation of the word may stem out of Stendhal. Flaubert was certainly grandfather to any
verbal renovation of our time, but the phase specifically touted by Mr. Joyce's Parisians and
international penumbra was already in full vigour in Mr. Lewis' writing in BLAST 1914. At a time when
Mr. Joyce was still the strict classicist of 'Chamber Music', 'Dubliners' and the Portrait of the Artist as a
beau jeune homme. The difference being that Lewis' renovation of the word was a vigourous
renovation and not a diarrhoeic imitation of Mr. Joyce's leisurely flow and murmurous permuting.
Lewis' renovation was conceptual. Joyce's merely, in the main, sonorous, an attraction on the half-
awake consciousness to and by similar sounds. 29

'Leisurely flow' and 'murmurous permuting' could hardly be taken as praise. However, more

important was the difference in style and the notion that anything appealing to the masses through

stylistic devices alone could not be considered as strong as the conscious effort to transcend

categories imposed by previous conceptions of art. This is the kind of criticism which would have

probably secured Eliot's admonishment. Literature and seriousness (nobility) are coupled together

in an ultimate effort, not only to define tradition and its line of pure descendance, but to offer a
30
judgement on literary quality which might then be observed by history.

29 Pound, E., 'D'Artagnan Twenty Years After', in Selected Prose: 1905-1965, (ed. William Cookson), Faber and Faber, London, 1973, p.
425.

30 Pound's next paragraph in the same essay confirms this tendency: "Naturally the abundance of conceptual bustle in Lewis is infinitely
less digestible, thence less attractive to writers of mediocre envergure. It is radically inimitable in that it can only come from a think-
organism in action, a mind actually initiating concepts, or at least very busily chucking them from one side of the head to another." ibid.
Such an assertion of intellectual superiority is in line with the concepts of 'nobility' and 'virility' outlined in the previous section. The
formulation in this specific paragraph, however, opens the scope for another reading. A reading that uncovers the seeds that gave birth to
the writings of post-world war critics. A concern for the conceptual, and for thought as the basis for accurate literary criticism and not the
mere stylistic component and 'sonorous' beauty of the work itself, prepares us for the writing and critical requirements of structuralists and
deconstructionists.
In Pound's eyes, further proof emanates from the fact that "'at any rate' Lewis has never for five

minutes been willing just to sit back and be a celebrity. Herein Mr. Joyce celticly approaches his
31
equally celebrated Irish confrere and predecessor."

In matters of style and those related to the influence of nineteenth-century French literature Roland

Barthes has provided a succinct progression of authors and loose categories to serve as an

introduction for his concept of "l'écriture au degré zéro". He distinguishes the Flaubertian phase

where writing turns from its genius-driven vigour to a different 'artisanal' genius and includes writers

like Théophile Gautier, Paul Valery and André Gide. Barthes then goes on to identify a sort of 'pre-

revolutionary' writing later adopted by leftist political groups that falls within the scope of an

artificially achieved poetic realism akin to that of Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, and Alphonse

Daudet. Lastly, he offers us writing as silence with the magnificent example of Albert Camus and his

effective neutrality of style. This he calls "le degré zéro", which in 1953 can be seen swiftly moving

towards the dramatic and now famous 'death of the author' latter stance. Barthes, however,

manages to convey in his own captivating manner the import of what Pound was driving at in

making the above distinctions. Barthes' perspective is somewhat ironic, yet it condenses accurately

the shift in literary opinions which Pound and his modernist contemporaries struggled to bring to the

fore through diverse experiments.

Such labour-value somehow replaces the genius-value. There is a sort of coquetry in saying that one
works very much one's form; at times, this even becomes a preciosity of concision (to work a
substance often means to cut it down) quite opposed to baroque preciosity (that of Corneille for
example). The one expresses an understanding of Nature which involves an extension of language;
the other, looking to produce an aristocratic style, sets up the conditions of an historical crisis which
will unravel the day when an aesthetic finality will no longer suffice to justify the convention of such
anachronic language; that is, the day when History will have brought about an evident disjunction
between the social vocation of the writer and the instrument afforded him through the Tradition. 32

31 ibid. p. 427.

32 Barthes, R., Le Degré Zéro de l'Écriture, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1972, p. 47. My translation of Barthes’: « Cette valeur-travail
remplace un peu la valeur-génie; on met une sorte de coquetterie à dire qu'on travaille beaucoup et très longtemps sa forme; il se crée
même parfois une préciosité de la concision (travailler une matière, c'est en général en retrancher), bien opposée à la grande préciosité
baroque (celle de Corneille par example); l'une exprime une connaissance de la Nature qui entraîne un élargissement du langage; l'autre,
cherchant à produire un style littéraire aristocratique, installe les conditions d'une crise historique, qui s'ouvrira le jour où une finalité
The intent of Pound's criticisms can easily be placed under the umbrella of Barthes’ more recent

literary aristocracy with his conception of 'the artist as the antidote to the multitudes' merely

confirming the previous Yeatsean formulation. And the proofs to the breach reported by Barthes are

best seen in the progression offered by works like Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses and the

failed inventory of culture outlined in the Cantos. As Terence Diggory has claimed in his appraisal of

Pound's "live tradition":

The real world could not be reformed by a mere act of self-assertion, as Pound humbly acknowledged
when he wrote, "I cannot make it cohere". What would not cohere were the real and the ideal worlds,
the objective and the subjective visions, which fell into disunion once again for Pound after the
momentary coherence of the Pisan Cantos. 33

Outside the scope of an abeyance to tradition of the kind Eliot came to profess in his poetic

testament Four Quartets, where a fusion of stylised modernist features and personal experience

managed to convey in a thoroughly dignified fashion what could otherwise be termed as 'perfected'

poetry, Modernism remains the label for a vacillating balancing act. If it is true that high modernism,

as Dennis Bartholomeusz has said, uses both a "technique of deliberate disorganization" and an
34
"elusive symbolist method", the Eliot of Four Quartets seems to have reached out of this

conceptual impasse to seal his verse with a measure of compromise which will secure canonisation.

Moreover, if we are prepared to accept Pound's criticism of Joyce, the Irishman may also be

included in the canon, as indeed he has been for the past hundred years. Only the figures who

clung to the ambivalent nature of art and history reflect most accurately the conceptual struggle

facing the early-twentieth century writer. Wyndham Lewis as well as Pound, and perhaps Nietzsche

much earlier, let the scope of events engulf their own personal lives in what seems an effort to both

embody and resolve the tensions created by a break from tradition. If Nietzsche's balancing of the

Dionysian and Apollonian instincts is a clear notion, the actual mise en scène, underneath its cogent

esthétique ne suffira plus à justifier la convention de ce langage anachronique, c'est-à-dire le jour où l'Histoire aura amené une
disjonction évidente entre la vocation sociale de l'écrivain et l'instrument qui lui est transmis par la Tradition. »

33 Diggory, T., Yeats & American Tradition, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1983, p. 57.

34 Bartholomeusz, Dennis, 'T. S. Eliot and the Golden Bough', Collegium Antropologium, Vol. 15, nº 2, Zagreb, Croatia, p. 343.
labelling might be as fraught with complexities as is Lewis' meticulous description of the accent of

one of his characters in his The Revenge for Love.

An attractive foreign accent – say the last vestiges of aristocratic French on the tongue of an émigré –
made her speech pleasant and a little "quaint." It was not a foreign accent, however. As she had been
poor, she had taught herself English, and so had evolved a composite speech of her own. It was
flavoured with American talkie echoes; but on the whole it suggested a French origin, and was
extremely pretty, though her voice had gone a little hollow with the constant effort cautiously to shape
the words correctly. 35

35 Lewis, W., The Revenge for Love, (ed. Reed Way Dasembrock), Black Sparrow Press, Santa Rosa, 1991, p. 71.