[In the following essay, originally published in 1959, Tate—the famed poet and head of the Bollingen Prize jury—defends his selection of Pound as the winner of their 1949 award as being due to Pound's efforts in regenerating language, though oddly he has strong criticism of the Pisan Cantos.]

What I shall say here is not in further commentary on Mr. William Barrett's article in the April, 1949, issue of Partisan Review; nor is it the “rational, impersonal, and calm justification” of the award of the Bollingen Prize to Ezra Pound which Mr. Barrett was kind enough to expect from me. I intend rather to set down my own reasons for voting for the Pisan Cantos. I shall have in mind the Partisan symposium on the award without, I hope, being influenced by it in reconstructing my views of last November.¹

From the time I first read Pound's verse more than thirty years ago I have considered him a mixed poet. In an essay written in 1931, on the first thirty Cantos, I expressed views which the later accretions to the work have not changed: the work to which I helped to give the Bollingen Prize is formless, eccentric and personal. The Cantos are now, as I said then, “about nothing at all.” They have a voice but no subject. As one of the commentators on Mr. Barrett's article put it, they have no beginning, middle or end. I used similar language in 1931. It is a striking fact that in talking about this work one must say “Canto XX of the Cantos”; there is always a Canto of Cantos, not a Canto of a substantive work with a title like “Canto XX” of the Purgatorio of the Divina Commedia.

Mr. Pound is incapable of sustained thought in either prose or verse. His acute verbal sensibility is thus at the mercy of random flights of “angelic insight,” Icarian self-indulgences of prejudice which are not checked by a total view to which they could be subordinated. Thus his anti-Semitism—which, as Mr. Auden has said, all Gentiles have felt (I have felt it, and felt humiliated by it)—his anti-Semitism is not disciplined by an awareness of its sinister implications in the real world of men. Neither Mr. Pound nor any other man is to be censured for his private feelings; but every man must answer for what he does with his feelings. It has been often observed that Pound fails to get into his verse any sort of full concrete reality. Insofar as the Cantos have a subject, it is made up of historical materials. But if there is any poetry of our age which may be said to be totally lacking in the historical sense, the sense of how ideas move in history, it is Pound's Cantos. His verse is an anomaly in an age of acute historical awareness.

I do not know what reasons, motives or prejudices prompted the other affirmative votes. There has been some public conjecture upon this subject, but I consider it a gross impropriety. I shall do well if I am able to speak honestly for myself. I have little sympathy with the view that holds that Pound's irresponsible opinions merely lie alongside the poetry, which thus remains uncontaminated. The disagreeable opinions are right in the middle of the poetry. And they have got to be seen for what they are: they are personal, willful and unrelated; and they are not brought together under a mature conception of life as it is now or ever was. I infer the absence of such a mature view in the man from the incoherence of the form; but it is only the latter that concerns me. Apart from specific objections to his anti-Semitism and fascism, there is a formal principle which, if severely applied, would have been a good enough reason for voting against the Pisan Cantos. Not only the anti-Semitism but all the other “insights” remain unassimilated to a coherent form. The assumption of many persons that a vote for the Pisan Cantos was a vote for “formalism” and a vote against “vitality” in poetry makes no sense at all to me.

There is nothing mysterious about coherent form. It is the presence of an order in a literary work which permits us to understand one part in relation to all the other parts. What should concern us in looking at the Cantos is the formal irresponsibility; in looking beyond the work, the possible effects of this irresponsibility upon society. (If Pound's Cantos expressed anti-fascist opinions, my formal objections would be the same; but I should think that the formlessness would make him a good Communist party-line poet.) But just as Pound's broadcasts over Radio Rome never influenced anybody in this country, and were chiefly an indignity perpetrated upon himself, I cannot suppose that the anti-Semitism of the Cantos will be taken seriously by anybody but liberal intellectuals. Anti-Semites will not “use” it. It is too innocent. I take it seriously in the sense of disliking it, and I cannot “honor the man” for it, as the Fellows of the Library were charged with doing; but I cannot think that it will strengthen anti-Semitism.

I respect differences of opinion on this question, about which I am not well informed. What I have already said is enough to indicate that my vote for the Pisan Cantos was not an easy step to take; I could have voted against it. But this is not all. I had, as many men of my generation might have had, personal reasons for not voting for Mr. Pound. Insofar as he has noticed my writings at all, in conversation and correspondence—which the international literary grapevine always reports—he has noticed them with contempt.

Nevertheless I voted for him, for the following reason: the health of literature depends upon the health of society, and conversely; there must be constant vigilance for both ends of the process. The specific task of the man of letters is to attend to the health of society not at large but through literature—that is, he must be constantly aware of the condition of language in his age. As a result of observing Pound's use of language in the past thirty years I had become convinced that he had done more than any other man to regenerate the language, if not the imaginative forms, of English verse. I had to face the disagreeable fact that he had done this even in passages of verse in which the opinions expressed ranged from the childish to the detestable.

In literature as in life nothing reaches us pure. The task of the civilized intelligence is one of perpetual salvage. We cannot decide that our daily experience must be either aesthetic or practical—art of life; it is never, as it comes to us, either/or; it is always both/and. But as persons of a particular ethos, of a certain habit and character, we discharge our responsibilities to society from the point of view of the labors in which we are placed. We are placed in the profession of letters. We cannot expect the businessman and the politician, the men who run the state, to know that our particular responsibility exists; we cannot ask them to understand the more difficult fact that our responsibility to them is for the language which they themselves use for the general welfare. They are scarcely aware of language at all; what one is not aware of one almost inevitably abuses. But the medium cannot be extricated from the material, the how from the what; part of our responsibility is to correct the monism of the statesman who imagines that what he says is scarcely said in language at all, that it exists apart from the medium in a “purity” of action which he thinks of as “practicality.” If men of letters do not look after the medium, nobody else will. We need never fear that the practical man will fail to ignore our concern for the health of language; this he has already done by indicting Pound as if Pound, like himself, were a monist of action. Pound's language remains our particular concern. If he were a convicted traitor, I should still think that, in another direction which complicates the problem ultimately beyond our comprehension, he had performed an indispensable duty to society.

Note

1. The first award of the Bollingen Prize was made in 1949 to Ezra Pound for the Pisan Cantos, published in 1948; but the prize was voted to him in November, 1948, by the Fellows in American Letters of the Library of Congress, who were then the jury of the award. I was a member of the jury. Since 1950 the Bollingen Prize has been under the auspices of the Yale University Library.