In his essay, “Ez and Old Billyum,” Richard Ellmann refers to these lines and restricts his commentary to a single, ironic sentence: “Orage stood on the firm ground of Major Douglas’ economics.”² Clearly Ellmann intends to allow Pound’s own extravagance to mock its author, and his laconic dismissal itself “stands on” the assurance that all except for a few “credit cranks” (Pound’s own term)³ will find the poet’s judgment not worth serious consideration. Later in this chapter, I will examine the function of Pound’s fiscal doctrine as an integral development of his conception of history, but first there is a...

If the discussion at the end of the preceding chapter gradually began to emphasize a curious hybrid of traditionally discrete discourses—the historical and the eschatological—my reasons for yoking such unlikely categories was neither the example of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” nor the desire to provide an intermediate stage between a section devoted toThe Cantos’ historical codes and one centered on the poem’s religious beliefs. Rather,The Cantosthemselves enforce the abolition of any clear dividing-line, including a larger and more various group of cosmic principles, traditional deities, and religious philosophies among its “historical characters”...

“It may suit some of my friends to go about with their noses pointing skyward, decrying the age and comparing us un-favourably to the dead men of Hellas or of Hesperian Italy. . . . But I, for one, have no intention of decreasing my enjoyment of this vale of tears by under-estimating my own generation.”² These lines, so characteristic of Pound’s exuberance at its finest, record both the energy he derived from collaborating “with the most intelligent men of the period” (GK:217), the “lordly companions” with whom he had struggled to modernize the arts of his day, and his...

“The narrative is . . . to be regarded not as an end in itself but as a vehicle for transmitting the material of the tribal encyclopedia which is . . . dispersed into a thousand narrative contexts.”³ Thus Eric Havelock describes the Homeric epics. Pound, too, was attempting to write a tribal encyclopedia, one adequate to the the needs of his own day, and thus, of necessity, incorporating far more, and often quite different kinds of, material than sufficed for the Homeric age. Pound had far too sure a grasp of language to think any poem could literally be...

Ashbery, of course, is right: the burden of responsibility for our own words and gestures is not lessened by the appropriation of another’s name or the accents of a distancing idiom. Yet how often in modern literature has the very necessity of naming, the knowledge that we acquire speech only through the words of others been experienced as a radical impoverishment of the writer’s own identity, a “removal” of his right to exist as anauthor? We still use the termpersonaas though it offered an explanation, not a problem, as if the right relationship between poet and mask,...

In 1971, the same year in which Hugh Kenner’s brilliantly partisan study,The Pound Era, appeared, one of the most distinguished contemporary English poets published an equally partisan, although far more obviously pugnacious, account of modern verse. For this occasion, an introduction to John Betjeman’sCollected Poems, Philip Larkin adopted a distinctly belligerent posture: the tough-talking, anti-American, equally contemptuous of the “culture-mongering activities of the Americans Eliot and Pound” and of the “pompous, pseudo-military operation of literary warfare”³ which has secured their reputation.

To Larkin, “modernism” is largely a bankrupt fraud, and, instead of joining in any homage to the...

To judge a poem, even in part, by the responses it helped to provoke in subsequent texts is obviously a dangerous practice. Not only may the responses be irrelevant to the actual accomplishment of the initial work, but the discussion of these other writings is bound to be one-sided in its emphasis. Yet if one acknowledges that Pound’s argument about “the artist who does the next job” suggests a valuable, if rarely used, critical method, then my own procedure in the following two sections will appear far from arbitrary. Not only did Williams and Olson offer many of the most...

“Art is local.” As a slogan, these words ring more like “an identification and a plan for action” (Invocation:2) than a critical absolute. Even though the phrase was originally attributed to the Flemish painter Maurice Vlaminck, widely repeated in the circle gathered around Alfred Stieglitz, and quoted by Williams’ friend Marsden Hartley in his 1921 memoirs,Adventures in the Arts,¹ today these words seem uniquely associated with the aesthetics of William Carlos Williams. Like John Dewey’s article, “Americanism and Localism,” which appeared inThe Dialin June 1920 (“We are discovering that the locality is the only universal”),² Vlaminck’s assertion...

Paterson, as J. M. Brinnin rightly observes, has “an all-of-a-piece consistency on an intellectual level, but on an emotive level the poem is vastly uneven.”² Accordingly, much of the critical energy devoted to Williams’ poem has centered on an explication—and implicit celebration—of the work’s “intellectual consistency,” combined with a nervous awareness of how difficult it is to reconcile that reassuring surface coherence with its unstable and shifting bases. Yet, I suspect thatPatersonsucceeds only when it abandons its symbolic structure, when, in place of the eponymous hero and his metaphoric landscape, the text directly confronts the “delirium...

Thus, in 1886 Stéphane Mallarmé sought to locate theminimumprecondition for the creation of literature, the unbridgeable chasm which divides two essentially incompatible deployments of language. Yet the very need to insist upon so categorical a disjunction reveals that contamination is always possible, that the chasm may prove only a threshold, a shifting margin habitually traversed by the discourse of any text. There is a sense in which the poetics Mallarmé sought was haunted at its very inception by what it would most deny, by the inherent availability of language to the public rhetoric of “les journaux.”

One of...

Olson so often attacked conventional notions of history as an impediment to man’s self-knowledge that critics like Donald Davie have been tempted to regard him as essentially antihistorical, as wanting tosubstitutea geographical notion of “space” for any sense of temporal sequence and causality.² Yet Olson’s principal mentor in the “doctrine of the earth,”³ Carl Sauer, himself warned that “We cannot form an idea of landscape except in terms of its time relations as well as of its space relations,”⁴ and the entire thrust of Olson’s polemic is towards an integration ofchronosandgea, a perception, in Charles...

Structurally,The Maximus Poemsare constituted by the interaction between two types of “records,” two narratives which, during the course of the text, are meant to unite and validate a particular (even if, as we shall see, highly problematic) ethical imperative. Because history is presented through the subjective, fragmentary responses of Olson’s own daily reactions to Gloucester—“that tradition is / at least is where I find it, / how I got to / what I say” (“Letter 11”: 48)—as well as through the objective chronicle of the town’s past, the poem contains a double plot, an impersonal “outer...

In some ways, Stephen Dedalus’ “History . . . is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,”³ is the more reassuring outcry. For, in spite of Yeats’s assertion, in dreams one is responsible primarily to oneself, and no matter how enmeshing the psychological lures, or how fascinating the specular authority of one’s own demons, the chance to awake is always potentially at hand, the movement of a radical deliverance already implicit in the very repressions that had constituted the original terror.

History, however, provides no private awakenings. There is no individual gesture of courage or lucidity with sufficient...