andie nachgeborenen wrote:
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> Wasn't the question _quality_, not influence.
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> Pound, Eliot, Yeats, fascists or reactionaries, all great poets. Philip Larkin, right wing racist jerk, same. Kipling, great storyteller. Balzac, great novelist. One of Marx's unfinished projects was a literary study of Balzac. Conrad (monarchist reactionary, Carlist gunrunner), great master of the English language. Celine (Nazi collaborator), great writer. Daughter watched Birth of a Nation with me, fascinated horror. She said, I know I could never admit this outside the house, but this is one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. Riefenstahl, pure Nazi propaganda and high cinematic art. Etc. And one can add: Heidegger, Nazi, great philosopher; Schmitt, Nazi ideologue, great political thinker.
I.A. Richards, if I remember correctly, said that a book was a machine to think with. That is better, I think, than Milton's argument that books were living things. If a book hurts someone, it is only by way of persuading an actual living thing to carry out the harm. The Cantos, fascism, racism, and all are a wonderful machine to think with: they force the reader constantly to try to give shape to extract the direction from various bundles. He goes to visit an old schlar in a German city, among other things to ask him about an editorial crux in a provencal poem. He starts out by talking about everything clean and fresh in Frieberg (? something like that). And on that page Pound's metrical greatness is at its greatness: the lines are clean and fresh (for the reader immured in the Cantos they echo the lines (some Cantos later) channelling John Adams writing that reading Cicero improved his circulation and cleaned his pores. And returning to the visit to the old scholar one realizes that the scholarly (editorial) struggle is prcisely for "clean" lines, for the lines the poet wrote, not for the muddy lines some copyist created. And following that up, going back to the politics that forms/deforms the poem, one notices that though Pound chose a disgusting reality from the world for his metaphor, that nevertheless the way he _uses_ that metaphor (fascism) is about clear lines in politics. (Lines, in all the words senses, wind their way through Pound's poetry and his prose -- he looks for sharp lines in music.) But at this point one can leave the poem while not quite leaving it: What are the qualities of "modern life" (or developed capitalism in the west) that make it possible for Fascism to be _the_ metaphor for clarity for one of the greatest poets of the age?
Carrol