Carl Remick wrote:
>
(e) arguably the two
> dreariest writers ever to put pen to paper, Milton and Pound.
Really?
I Who e're while the happy Garden sung, By one mans disobedience lost, now sing Recover'd Paradise to all mankind, By one mans firm obedience fully tri'd Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil'd In all his wiles, defeated and repuls't, And Eden rais'd in the wast Wilderness.
Thou Spirit who ledst this glorious Eremite Into the Desert, his Victorious Field Against the Spiritual Foe, and broughtst him thence By proof the undoubted Son of God, inspire, As thou art wont, my prompted Song else mute, And bear through highth or depth of natures bounds With prosperous wing full summ'd to tell of deeds Above Heroic, though in secret done, And unrecorded left through many an Age, Worthy t'have not remain'd so long unsung.
(Paradise Regained, I, 1- 17)
Where else in English can you find syntax that carries you from one phrase to the next, one line to the next so irresistably? How can one find a place to stop reading such mastery?
. . .and broughtst him thence By proof the undoubted Son of God . . .
I'm not an expert on metrics, but I think the "By proof" is a spondee, and in any case the line break from the weakly stressed _him thence_ to the explosive _By proof_ "Exercises my lungs, revives my spirits opens my pores / reading Tully on Cataline quickens my circulation" (John Adams, channeled by Pound in Canto LXIII). Milton himself tried to explain this kind of effect as the "true musical delight; which consists onely in apt Numbers, fit quantity of Syllables, and the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another" (Note on The Verse, prefaced to PL), an effect more powerfully achieved in PR than in PL. And though less dramatic, there is a fine surprise at the beginning of line 12, with the phrase, "As thou art wont," separating the active verb "inspire" from its object, and _also_ linking PR with all that has preceded in Milton's career -- perhaps even including his defense of regicide: "As thou are wont" -- not just on one occasion (PL) but (or so I would gloss the phrase) as a habitual practice, applying to the great prose pieces of the revolution as well as to the poetry. It is that sense variously drawn out, endlessly surprising with such touches as the line break noted above, that makes both PL and PR such powerful barriers against the onslaughts of Alzheimers, cutting one new channel after another among the neurons.
And even in these opening lines of PR one can see that Milton's subversive potential is still alive in a world infested with Gibson's _Passion_: Not the human sacrifice glorified by traditional xtianity but intellectual and moral battle of the human individual on the vast new social terrain generated by capitalism:
now sing Recover'd Paradise to all mankind, By one mans firm obedience fully tri'd Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil'd In all his wiles, . . .
It's the abstract, isolated, human individual critiqued by Marx, but still, in its time, a liberating recognition, however stifling now when reduced to celebrating minor changes in cuisine. In PR we are barely a hair's breadth away from Diderot.
Really, you're missing out on an awful lot Carl
And Pound?
Or followed the water. Or looked back to the flowing; Others approaching that cataract, As to dawn out of shadow, the swathed cloths Now purple and orange, And the blue water dusky beneath them,
pouring there into that cataract, With noise over shingle.
striking with:
hah hah ahah thmm, thunb, ah
woh woh araha thummm, bhaaa. And from the floating bodies, the incense
blue-pale, purple above them. Shelf of the lotophagoi, Aerial, cut in the aether.
Reclining, With the silver spilla, The ball as of melted amber, coiled, caught up, and turned. Lotophagoi of the suave nails, quiet, scornful, Voce-profundo:
"Feared neither death nor pain for this beauty; If harm, harm to ourselves." And beneath: the clear bones, far down, Thousand on thousand.
"What gain with Odysseus, "They that died in the whirlpool "And after many vain labours, "Living by stolen meat, chained to a rowingbench, "The he should have great fame
"And lie by night with the goddess? "Their names are not written in bronze
"Nor their rowing sticks set with Elpenor's; "Nor have they mound by sea-bord.
"That saw never the olives under Spartha "With the leaves green and then not green,
"The click of light in their branches; "That saw not the bronze hall nor the ingle "Nor lay there with the queen's waiting maids, "Nor had they Circe to couch-mate, Circe Titania, "Nor had they meats of Kalupso "Or her silk skirts brushing their thighs. "Give! What were they given?
Ear-wax. "Poison and ear-wax,
and a salt grave by the bull field. "_neson aumumona_, tgheir heads like sea-crows in the foam, "Black splotches, sea-weed under lightning; "Canned beef of Apollo, ten cans for the boat load."
(Canto XX)
The _Odyssey_ rewritten by a man whose friends had witnessed the slaughter in the trenches of the Great War:
And because that son of a bitch,
Franz Josef of Austria. . . . . . And because that son of a bitch Napoleon Barbiche... They put him on Hill 70, in a trench
dug through corpses With a lot of kids of sixteen, Howling and crying for their mamas, And he sent a chit back to his major:
I can hold out for ten minutes With my sergeant and a machine-gun.
And they rebuked him for levity. And Henri Gaudier went to it,
and they killed him, And killed a good deal of sculpture, . . . .
(Canto XVI)
(Napoleon Barbiche is Napoleon III. The "he" on Hill 70 was Richard Aldington, imagist poet and husband of the poet H.D.)
I'm not of course accepting Pound's idiosyncratic (and ultimately vicious) attempts to _explain_ history: but he _sees_ what needs to be explained with extraordinary power: "The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant's bent shoulders" (Canto LXXIV).
"Dreary" -- you've got to be kidding.
And you're a bit wrong on how I spent my career:
Carl Remick wrote:
> (e) spent his career elucidating arguably the two
> dreariest writers ever to put pen to paper, Milton and Pound.
Pound never formed part of my career: I read him strictly for my own private pleasure. My dissertation was on Pope, and I was trying to write an essay on the _Dunciad_ when I was interrupted as it were by Johnson's invasion of the Dominican Republic. In fact I was rather extensively interrupted and never got to teach much other than various freshman classes. Which, as they used to say in the '50s, is the way the cookie crumbles.
Carrol