[lbo-talk] Re: Signs of hope?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Jun 14 16:46:26 PDT 2003


Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>
> [clip] activists desert
> political activity to line up behind the Democratic Party, which always
> I think is a signal of giving up.
>

As I clicked the send button I had a vague feeling that this last line echoed something -- and it does, two of the poems from Pound's _Lustra_:

SOCIETY

The family position was waning,

And on this account the little Aurelia,

Who had laughed on eighteen summers,

Now bears the palsied contact of Phidippus.

ARIDES

The bashful Arides

Has married an ugly wife,

He was bored with his manner of life,

Indifferent and discouraged he thought he might as

Well do this as anything else.

Saying within his heart, "I am no use to myself,

"Let her, if she wants me, take me."

He went to his doom.

Aurelia seems to me a perfect image of the left activist disappearing into the DP.

Carrol



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