SOURCE: Watts, Harold H. “Reckoning.” In Ezra Pound: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Walter Sutton, pp. 98-114. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1953, Watts attempts to define Pound's The Cantos in light of the author's method, tone, goals, and ultimately whether it effectively disseminated its stated aims.]

I

The Cantos is a poem that interests in many connections. It is the capital piece of “evidence” in any dispute between Ezra Pound and the United States government. Literarily, it cannot be regarded as a “sport,” a willful driving of the language in the direction of obscurity and inconsecutiveness. It is rather—in respect to technique—the investigation of the resources of our language when manipulated in an unusual way: a way that Pound was driven to discover as an alternative to communication that is orderly, logical, and (in Pound's opinion) bootless.

At this point, certain things must be clear. We can know what the poem attempts and what it does not attempt. We can see that there are different techniques of confusion in our culture, techniques that the facile reader lumps together. We can see that it is uncritical to identify a technique that is invented and perfected in the interest of renewing our language and culture (Pound's technique in The Cantos) with techniques which, at points, it may resemble. These other techniques may prove, on inspection, to be no more than verbal gestures that express despair or cynicism in the face of our cultural crisis. They may record—as readers of much recent poetry know—the poet's sense that he is utterly apart—in himself and in his peculiar and injured sensitivity—from the great panorama of destruction that is our time. At any rate, his poem will be a record—more or less confusing in technique—of what it is for one person to live through a troubled age; his poem may even be a gesture of resignation in the face of what is too great for him to think of mastering. Study of the work would doubtless be complete at such a point; if no more than personal revelation is supposed or guessed to inhere in a poem, “justice” is done it when one has pointed out the probable sources of the malaise and the peculiar use of language which is useful to the poet in registering or alleviating this malaise. One may say that, for such a poet, the writing of a poem is fundamentally expression and only incidentally communication.

It is not so with Pound. The writing of The Cantos is at least as much communication as expression. True, it would not have been written save for the deep discomforts, the intense impatiences, that can be identified as the fruit of Pound's immediate and personal contact with capitalist-democracy. He never lets us forget that the times are out of joint. Nor does he let us forget what is more important: that if the times are to be set to rights, it is he and his poem that very likely will do it.

It is because of this optimism—an optimism marked by old wounds but doggedly pursuing success within very constricted limits—that analysis may not stop at this point. Optimistic after its fashion, Pound's poem aims at communication; the effect expected of it is that, by the act of communication, it will modify the “paideuma,” the cluster of custom and idea to which we attach ourselves uncritically. Our reckoning of The Cantos involves us not only in treatment of the poem itself but also in estimates of its value as an attack on the crucial ailment of our time. The ailment may be phrased thus, in language that is in line with Pound's own angle of approach: there is a great defect in the inner “go” of our culture; and it is a defect that will not be offset by conferences, treaties, and pacts—nor yet by the pulpit exhortations of the frocked and of the non-frocked in “learneries.” That Pound has addressed himself to this huge task leads us to execute a further act of judgment that would not be at all necessary were The Cantos chiefly a self-gratifying act of skill. This act of judgment involves answering the following questions. Does the method of the ideogram—the striving to put to work in English (and at an exceedingly complex task) a mode of communication that Pound first perceived in Chinese poetry—actually produce the communication that Pound desiderates? Effective or not, to what general tendency in modern culture may Pound's chosen mode of communication be linked? (To be sure, Pound's tone suggests that his chosen mode is unique, a new departure in our culture. Of this claim in particular we need to be skeptical.) Finally, is what Pound does communicate as full of meat as he thinks it is? Does it—this proffered aggregate of insights—actually constitute a really impressive prologomena to the labors of renewing our culture? Does it, by the light it casts on dark reaches of our experience, teach us to walk better than we walk at present?

It is indeed wise to be on one's guard at two related points: reckless and subjective speculation about what a poet's intention might have been, and the uncritical acceptance of the poet's own account of the intention that lay behind the writing of a certain poem. Neither clue should be regarded as the final measure of the worth and the effect of a finished poem. Any judgment of a poem like The Cantos must be very incomplete indeed if it does not run the risk of “the intentional fallacy.” It is apparent that the subject of this essay is not The Cantos, the poem for its own sake, cut free of the ties that link it to the poet and the age in which both we and the poet live. This study, it is plain, is concerned throughout with The Cantos as an important part of a phenomenon that is both complex and instructive: a “composed” triad made up of three terms—Pound, his poem, and us as elements in an age. The meaning of any one of these items is impoverished when it is detached from the other two. Let us insist that Pound's account of what his poem is supposed to be and how it ought to operate does not constitute a complete statement of what the poem actually is. In fact, Pound's account must be “corrected” by answers to the following questions. Is the ideogram-method actually effective in English? What place does Pound occupy in the traditional picture of Western thought? What is the actual moral and political illumination contained in The Cantos? Perhaps a useful predictive statement can be made. What Pound says of his rhetoric is apt and casts light on dark places in the poem. But what Pound claims for the effect of his poem—that it avoids the sins of abstraction and generates new volitions in the reader—must be regarded with some suspicion. But the strongest suspicion must be reserved for Pound's claims to being a social prophet both novel and worthy of credence.

II

The concept at the heart of Pound's thought is that of “ideas in action.” Though Pound is quite modest in his frequent acknowledgements of his debt to the studies of Fenollosa which introduced the ideogram to him, his estimate of what the ideogram-method will accomplish in poetry and later in our culture is not modest. Acting through The Cantos, the “ideas in action” will assault the modern will effectively—will be the fulcrum to pry the carriage of modern civilization from bad rails to good ones. This—let us concede—is a far from modest estimate of an idea. But if events should justify Pound (and he is optimist enough to expect them to), he would have no reason to be modest. No one pretends that our society does not stand in grim need of renovation. Nor would anyone deny the word epochal to an idea or set of ideas that really “delivered”—that did for our culture what Pound believes his concept can.

To a point, Pound's development of his central insight into a programme, a basis for action, has a good deal of cogency. We grant that our civilization languishes; we concede that one of the vitiating forces (not the only one) is usury as Pound understands it. As students of literature, we also find it pleasant to agree that it is only the power of language, only the changes it may induce in our modes of thought, that will take us from the evil paths in which we walk. We can see—both from Pound's theory and his practice—that language as it is manipulated now exerts little pressure on our wills and our thoughts. We grant that its custodians have, consciously or unconsciously, sold out to the usurers (or to whatever group or force that, in our judgment, threatens our culture with disunity and decay). It is true that words, for the most part, have come to stand for nothing at all; it is probably true that words must come to stand for something if the society in which we live is to be the expression of more than clouds of undefined, unsatisfied desires which now surround us.

Pound's vehemence suggests that he is fighting a solitary battle. But there is actually a large area of agreement that we share with him. Indeed, no one who follows the general movements of Western thought can regard as detached or novel Pound's diagnosis of culture and language disintegration; nor will the observer have to think long to remember the names of other writers who seek to renew a lapsed and betrayed language.

Therefore, Pound's inferences from the concept, “ideas in action,” must not mislead us. We can make out a large “area of agreement.” More important—and by that token more difficult to grasp since more is demanded than facile acquiescence to implement this second perception—is it to see that “ideas in action” is in itself not a novel concept. By framing this concept Pound (whether he wishes to or not) becomes party to a struggle that is not new at all. The struggle is a perennial one, one that is much older than usury itself (at least, as Pound reckons the age of usury).

To be sure, we are likely to be misled by Pound when we seek to identify this struggle, since (for Pound) the crucial stages of this struggle occur in periods when capitalist-democracy is emerging or dominates. Perhaps to confess that the lineage of the struggle is ancient would be distasteful to Pound, for it would limit the validity of the usurious-nonusurious division that runs through Pound's speculation. But since that division need not be basic to ours, we damage nothing dear to us when we perceive that Pound is taking part in the latest round of the old realist-nominalist struggle: the struggle that emerged (not for the first time) in history and embroiled Abelard with Albertus Magnus.

The battle centered on this issue: Have ideas, in some sense, existence apart from or superior to their temporary material realization about which sense-impressions inform us? Or is the only reality which man knows that which keeps making direct assault on his five senses? The medieval realists asserted that ideas are superior in being or essence—without always agreeing on precisely how ideas had won and maintained this superiority. The nominalists—Abelard was one of these—insisted that the successive, separate moments of man's existence were the sources of the only insights worthy of trust. For the nominalists, ideas—at least, ideas as their opponents described their existence and operation—were at best view a deceptive twilight lingering on after the sun—the sense impressions—had vanished over the horizon. In another figure, the world as the nominalist saw it would have slight “tolerance” for the burdens of abstracted concepts that the other party tried to make it bear. To respond truthfully and accurately to the messages which the senses despatch is the whole duty of man; he misreads his destiny when he fancies, when he believes, that there are in addition ideas or concepts curiously self-existent to which he also owes service.

So stated, the twelfth century battle seems somewhat arid and devoid of import in a reckoning of Pound's “ideas in action” as they do indeed work out in action. How the old battle went, who won it (Abelard lost) is matter we expect to encounter in a history of philosophy—matter we dismiss as representative of the sort of busy work men invented when (as Pound tirelessly observes) they had nothing but words to work with.

Pound—let us observe immediately—is nowhere so foolish as to assert that idealism (our counterpart of the medieval “realism” that found concepts in themselves more real than what the senses absorbed seriatim) is exclusively the associate of usury. But Pound is sure that it is the climate of idealism that is the climate most favorable to usury; it is insidiously enervating—it discourages men from specific survey and study of the evils of our time. Pound notes several times that medieval “realism” was, as an intellectual construct, vastly superior to modern idealistic systems that keep us from having a precise view of our culture. True, the medieval systems Pound reprehends may have no closer touch with the five senses than their present counterpart; but the systems of Aquinas and others can at least provide esthetic pleasure, for the scholastics were able to manipulate their needlessly multiplied entities with grace and precision: both virtues of presentation that usury would rather not encounter, even in the realm of self-existent ideas.

But, praise the medieval “realists” as one will, one must not ever forget that they sponsored habits of thought that detached men from the life of the five senses, the nominalist reality. Abelard's resistance to these habits necessitated a work of destruction to precede the work of construction; he—or any other foe of “realism” ancient or modern—would have to discredit “realist” approaches to crucial problems before he would have any chance of displaying the profits inhering in his way of approach. In exactly the same way, Pound sees his labors beginning with a struggle to discredit the debased, shoddy version of “realism” that usury permits in our culture. Pound must win this battle (by explicit prose argument, by use of the method of the ideogram that is the basis of The Cantos) before he can really point to the profit of depending on his version of nominalism, of discovering counsel and motive force in “ideas in action.” If we recall what this concept really comes to, we see that it is sheerly nominalist. For the concept is a distillation of Pound's reading of human experience. Special events in human history and special facets of past human culture remain potentially sovereign for our current ills so long as our handling of history and past culture allows the import of a special event to remain firmly attached to the moment in time at which it first occurred. The special event must be kept firmly localized, crusted over with all in the way of the peculiar and the grotesque that being localized offers as opposition to the facile operations of a generalizing or abstracting “realism.” This battle of Pound's, however individualized by his statement of the grounds on which it may properly be fought, should be seen as part of a general struggle that animates Western culture at present—or convulses it. We have placed Pound's struggle in the region of ideas (if such a region may be mentioned in discussion of a person who denies that such a region exists). It is necessary here to suggest that a capital aspect of the “crisis” of our culture is the continuation, in our culture, of the realist-nominalist struggle. In our days, the struggle is fought, naturally, not with medieval weapons but with the instruments we chance on in contemporary armories. We need to see in what precise ways Pound's “ideas in action” employ weapons quite familiar to us. When we rehearse, as here, what the “ideas in action” are—words and acts resolutely undifferentiated from the contingent, condemned to wither the instant they are detached from the moment—we should hear familiar chimes ringing.

Pound is involved in a conflict deeper than fascist-democratic, a battle that in the last few generations has been fought not across boundaries but inside the boundaries of all the nations of which we have much knowledge. What must be condemned or accepted is not Pound the fascist (a word that tends to lose its precise significance now that it is applied to anything one happens to dislike); it is Pound the nominalist (as a thinker, as a poet) that we must approve or censure. He is essentially one of a company that locates truth and wisdom in the transient moment; he—like many other persons (many of them highly respected)—denies that truth exists in a fashion different from that in which the moment exists. In other words, the crux of the Pound problem is neither a political nor economic one, though—as we have seen—the problem seems to be stated in political and economic terms. The crux is, rather, this one: in what fashion do we read from experience; in what ways are we to lead others to read experience as we have read it? The poet is a political animal; yes. But he is a political animal not concerned with politics in any narrow sense—concerned rather with understanding and “rendering” the inclusive view that alone makes “politics” bearable. Pound would say that “politics” are bearable only when discussed and manipulated nominalistically, only when brought into contact with “ideas in action.”

This faith of Pound's—shall we call it the deification of the realized moment?—generates certain problems, in and out of poetry. The problem—political, it will be seen—is this: how, from a perception of moments, of particles of reality, can there emerge a really altered sensitivity, a will whose reorientation can be termed both “better” and permanent? To make a brutal stricture, is this not to expect from the impact of the “ideas in action” the very results that “realists” (medieval and modern) used quite emptily to believe came from assiduous exposure of the mind to the proper set of abstract ideas?

Pound, at any rate, is confident that the discipline of The Cantos, of the method of the ideogram, re-founded sensitivities; and it will make them harmonious and strong without any nonsensical talk about harmony and strength. It is the duty of a teacher of gymnastics to cultivate “form”; but he usually does so without much talk about form. Indeed, talk about form would doubtless confuse the minds attached to the splendid bodies in the teacher's charge. The body—and, with Pound, the will—is instructed by doing. This parallel, though close, is unjust to Pound at one point. He is a nominalist, he believes that the will must be assaulted by “engines” forged in a nominalist workshop; but he is not the ordinary sort of anti-intellectualist. A fair judge must concede that he uses his own mind rigorously; and it is plain that he expects his readers to respond keenly and accurately to the stimuli he offers them in The Cantos.

However, the fact remains that salvation by immediate experience is indeed the opposite of salvation by shared and perhaps imposed concepts. Further, one must grant that a trust in “ideas in action” pervades many quarters of modern literature. How else explain the almost mystical attachment to presentation of the thing-in-itself which informs a good deal of literary realism or naturalism? It cannot escape an observer that the naturalistic writer, after denying that his work stands in any relation to “first principles,” makes a leech-level survey of his slice of life—almost as if he hoped that the significance he denied elsewhere will emerge here. This being true, the artist does well to exercise all his ingenuity as he stalks each separate moment, each “idea in action.” Moreover, each stalking would be a new one, nor would one's present stalking be much aided by what one has learned from other intense forays on the moment in itself. Careless readers of The Cantos might think these remarks describe what one finds in Pound's poem; they do not, for reasons that will soon be clear. There is more in The Cantos than devout prostration before the object, the moment without filiations.

Pound's treatment of the moment, the only really numenous object in human experience, is qualified by the intensity, the protractedness, of the struggle in which he senses he is immersed. Before the moment can be adored, ideas in the form of general statements or coercive procedures must be driven from our culture. For Pound, this is the step which “costs”—costs in effort, in ingenuity, in courtship of failure even. Involved in taking this step, Pound cannot take one that would otherwise be highly attractive to him: that of maintaining that each moment is utterly detached, utterly devoid of correspondences with other moments. This latter step is an easy one to take; it leads the artist to a series of fervent embraces that can have no consequences, can lead to no entanglements. Furthermore, faith in the uniqueness of each moment forbids one from comparing embraces. Yet Pound, as a political animal, is committed to comparing embraces, to expecting consequences from them. He is intellectually a fervid endorser of the nominalist point of view; but he also hopes fervently for “results.” On what basis may a nominalist work for results? Can he so work without diminishing the gulf that he wants to keep between himself and all forms of conceptualism?

By a process, certain semanticists say, which can be called “time-binding.” Time-binding differs—that it really does differ depends on an act of faith and cannot be supported by clear experiment—from the process of abstraction in that the person who is time-binding is able to put into one bouquet flowers culled from various gardens without causing the flowers which make up the bouquet to lose their separate beauty and aroma.

The Cantos, it seems to me, is the product of a sustained attempt to present—in practice rather than by general description—an actual experiment in time-binding. We have seen that, for Pound, the necessity to act, to will, to reshape an evil world, makes the rapt adoration of the separate moment neither defensible nor tolerable. Here, indeed, is the underlying reason for Pound's detaching himself from the early imagist “programme”; for that “programme” did indeed advocate prostrating oneself before the moment, the object-in-itself. Is not this conflict relative to the proper treatment of what experience, from instant to instant, presents the old conflict between Martha and Mary? Mary sits at the feet of the Lord, the supreme and unique instant, and practices adoration; and Martha works to get the meal on the table. Pound, in mid-career, came to the conclusion that his lot (as a poet) was the task of getting the meal on the table: something that had not been done properly for generations. His was the labor of readying and directing a wide world of the imagination that would serve as a basis for future practical action.

But if Pound chose the activity of Martha, it had to be that activity on terms that do not vitiate such activity; there must be no contact with general concepts, with herbarium ideas. So the path of Pound (in The Cantos) is beset with dangers, just as—also of necessity—the path of his readers is beset with obscurities that cannot be removed. For the obscurities are the token that Pound remains on guard against the idealist incursions that would enervate both the writing and the reading of The Cantos.

Modern attempts toward such reordering and arrangement are, of course, not limited to Pound, nor are they limited to literature and verbal expression. We are familiar with the celebrated attempts of Cézanne to “do over” Poussin according to nature; we know the bold efforts of the post-impressionists to “correct” the dissolution of nature into points of light and color effected by Monet and others. Such “making things new” in terms of light and color is, however, comparatively easy because of the medium involved; the painter works in color and line and the “vibrations” color and line can set up. Identical effects are, we shall soon see, impossible of achievement in the medium of words and rhythm. In painting meaning and concepts can easily be regarded as secondary. But with written expression, meaning is or tends to become primary. Whatever present theories of poetry may say, words do not have the detachability from context, from the history of their use in the past, that color and line have. Perhaps for those who still seek “purity,” a terminus exists: the study of higher mathematics. And perhaps one may even, for painting and music, tolerate such a definition of art as this: Art tends to the conditions of mathematics. One may tolerate the definition, provided one understands that the verb tends signalizes an inclination that will not be realized. But the definition is hardly one that casts much light on what literature is; and I say this with unorthodox recent developments in mind. Further, I underline this reservation to suggest that a parallel between post-impressionism and “post-imagism” in poetry as it works out in The Cantos was intended to remind us of what the nominalist dilemma is; it was not intended to predict our judgment of the time-binding efforts of Pound's poem. That is, Cézanne may do over Poussin according to nature, and we may be quite willing to concede that he has done something that fulfills his promise, that he has done justice to nature without repeating the idealistic sins of Poussin. We may concede still more—that he has turned from the utter nominalism of Monet without becoming a returned votary at the shrine of the Ideal.

What we have now to ask is whether Pound's retreat from utter nominalism (which is, humanly speaking, quite as productive of inanity as the exact opposite, utter devotion to the undifferentiated One) has been as successful as Cézanne's and others. If it is successful, we should expect to find these two things: first, the creation of a sufficiently directing form, the literary analogue of the slopes of Cézanne's Mont Ste. Victoire; second—and here we bow to Pound's professed programme—exertion of sufficient pressure on the human will to produce a reorientation free of the dangers of idealism or abstractions: an aim, I feel, that is not open to one who works in color and line rather than in words.

The answer to the first question—whether there is, in The Cantos, a sufficiently directing form, will have to remain a subjective one. But as for the second point—whether Pound's poem works on the will as he hopes it will work—I think it is possible to be quite objective.

Perhaps the answer to the first question may take this form. We are aware that (in our present terms) a time-binding process is at all points under weigh in The Cantos. We are aware of cross-references, of clusters of ideograms that (like bees swarming) mysteriously but demonstrably swarm together. Each cluster of ideograms gets some of its cohesion because of its polarity to another cluster. How keenly this cohesion, this polarity, is felt must remain a matter for individual judgment.

But to answer the second query—whether Pound's poem actually makes the impact on the will that he desiderates—we can suggest a fairly objective answer. If the poem exercises coercion on the will, is that coercion effectively explained in nominalistic terms or in terms quite opposite? Does the coercion, if we grant it is in some way exerted, avoid the dangers said to inhere in the activity of professed idealism—such dangers as over-simplification of a problem and delusive separation from the complex reality that is man's only true reality, moment-to-moment experience? If it does not avoid these dangers, what is it that catches up with The Cantos: a defect in the poet, or factors of frustration in language itself? In brief, what is the real effect of The Cantos—the one Pound confidently predicts or some other?

The coercion, one may begin by saying, is not effected along purely nominalistic lines. It is not even effected along the relatively nominalistic lines that provide many a post-impressionist painter some basis for operation. Why is it that what is admittedly a delicate adjustment in painting becomes quite impossible for Pound? Why does the time-binding in The Cantos actually come so much nearer the “sins” of abstraction? The answer is this. The artist who works in line and color has a free field for his experiments once he has shattered (as many a painter and his critical sponsors have indeed been able to shatter) the public's habitual expectations as to painting: that pictures have a subject, that they should correspond to what our defective vision reports of reality. To shatter these habitual expectations was not easy (vide the critical battles fought over the successive efforts to present, on canvas, a new arrangement); but they have, by now, among the cognoscenti and the semi-cognoscenti, been shattered. The result is that today the knowing approach a new painter or a new “period” of an old artist with no expectations whatever except a hope to discover novelty, to see how this time nature has been rearranged. Perhaps the only objective test now applied to a new picture is whether there is—to a special rearrangement—an inner cohesion, a “go” that the cultivated sensibility may respond to. If this is so in art, why is it not possible in literature? Why may we not become accustomed there to the destruction of old expectations, the creation of new sets of attention? Pound plainly has faith that such a destruction and creation are quite possible.

There is an important difference that this analogy between painting and poetry must not conceal, a simple but a crucial one. Pound, as artist, submits to the bondage not of line and color but to the bondage of words: a much more onerous bondage. Line and color appeal direct to the sense of sight; and it is fairly easy to detach the sense of sight from the earlier expectations to which it has been—some would say “badly”—habituated. Thus, the “bondage” exercised by past use of line and color really rests lightly on the shoulders of the painter. Words are ineradicable. Their roots are their rhythms, their long-established harmonies with each other, their traditional ways of coming into relation with each other (and I mean more than grammar and syntax here). So the question reshapes itself thus for The Cantos. Can nature be rearranged in the medium of language, of an established verbal vehicle, without a reproduction of some of the effects judged (by Pound and others) to be pernicious? I do not think so.

Pound would, I am sure (as would a great many other writers who apply their talents to similar tasks) deny this with all the considerable vehemence at his command. He would maintain that his attack on the reader's sensibility, that the entire educative impact of The Cantos, reshapes the habitual patterns of our language, redirects its evolutions, arouses new expectations and then satisfies them. There are (he would argue) no abstractions or abstracting in The Cantos; rather is there a series of pure sensations, poignant and intense. It is because of lengthy submission to these sensations that the reader rises a changed person, his will urging him to travel in a new direction, his mind purified of those modes of employing words that have been the bane of Western capitalist-democratic culture. We may be willing to grant—as we have done—that a comparable reversal of will and sensibility may well take place in persons responsive to the full effects of (say) Picasso's reorganizations in line and color. But that such a reversal follows upon a careful reading of The Cantos is a hope rather than a fact. Such is the compulsion—some will say, “Such is the tyranny”—inherent in our language. We are not, of course, prohibited from depicting for ourselves the results of the cessation of the law of gravity, a shift in the condensing point of vapor. But only the writers of “science fiction” try to follow out fancies about altered laws of nature; and we must observe that Pound comes close to realizing his myth of an altered language very seldom. What he does in The Cantos is different from what he judges he is doing. This observation does not deny merit to the poem; it seeks rather to clarify the merit that the poem really has.

What follows—as “proof” of the observations just made, as clarification of Pound's poem—is, naturally, the product of one person's reading of The Cantos. It is possible that other sensibilities will give a different response to the poem. It is possible, that is, that the poem will indeed re-educate other wills without creating, in the process, abstractions perfectly recognizable, perfectly discutible. But until that happens—until, for a large body of readers, Pound's myth of language-as-it-ought-to-be coincides with the effects of language encountered in the actual poem—the following may perhaps be accepted as an account of what “happens” to a mind in contact with The Cantos. It is an account of being involved not only in time-binding but in abstractions; for, despite the embarrassments which Pound provides, language manages to behave in its wonted fashion—within the limits provided by the English language, at least. For that matter, one should remain skeptical that Chinese is as free from the evil process of abstracting as Pound supposes. The “machinery” of that language may not happen to produce words and locutions as obviously removed from sense experience as ours. But that is no indication that the human mind will not be up to its old incarnalities, even in Chinese. Such an assertion amounts to widening the argument, to saying that Pound strives against the structure of man's mind itself. There is a good deal of evidence that the human mind, beginning though it does with sense, cannot be restrained from hobbling on determinedly towards the abstractions that it usually manages badly, that it is very often deceived by. It is not irrelevant to note here what Chinese tell us about names like Cherry Blossom and Precious Wind, names that seem to us delicate and poetic and concrete. Such names arouse, in the Chinese breast, no more emotion than that which we feel when we hear a girl called Violet or Opal. In either language, any sensed metaphor has long since evaporated; both Precious Wind and Violet function as characterless tags—as, in a sense, words abstracted from concrete uses. So, one may suspect, with other elements in a language that, to Pound's taste, has a richness of sensual compulsion that English lacks. In any language, then—to take a dark view—the human mind staggers drunkenly after the potations that betray it. It does not cease systematizing impressions vivid and momentary. It is—in an earlier figure—not content with culling flowers only; it must press them.

We may be able to suppress a deviation into intellectual analysis when we look at Picasso's Guernica; but we cannot during the good many hours that The Cantos demand of us. Nor is this “failure” of ours vis à vis The Cantos our fault. Let us put the matter at its simplest, ignoring questions about what the psyche common to humanity may be. Mr. Pound and we, his readers, share a language. So long as he and we move within the confines of that language, we must submit to its coercion as well as to that of the ideogram. It is simply impossible to stop at the point where Pound would want us to stop, the point beyond which permissible and necessary time-binding degenerates into abstract thinking—even though we are aware of Pound's unclear caveat, “Thus far and no farther.” We concede that Pound is no enemy of certain sorts of general statement, as many a passage in Culture shows. We know that what he really wishes to do is to discredit certain specific abstractions, bad abstractions that bully and stupefy mankind. To whatever degree we sympathize, we cannot keep from noting that what the poet of The Cantos really strives for is not to tear out all abstractions (his expressed programme) but to tear out of the mind and the will the evil abstractions and to implant there concepts no less generalized, even though they are approached obliquely by means of the ideogram. These beneficial concepts are seldom directly referred to in the poem; that is unnecessary since their presence is pervasive. The mode of their existence is indeed somewhat novel, but that must not deceive us as to what they are; they are concepts, and it is special pleading to ask that, because their existence has been “coerced” in the mind of the reader rather than explicitly conferred on them by the poet, they should receive, at our hands, treatment different from that which we allot to other concepts that we encounter more directly and simply. The end-product of the method of the ideogram is not different in kind from the end-products of poets who handle language in a way that does not confuse us at all.

The concepts which are created in our minds by a reading of The Cantos constitute two or three brief statements about civilization. Man has a large range of feeling which the relatively good society—Pound has no illusions about discovering or creating a society absolutely good—allows expression; a relatively bad society stifles the expression of the range of feeling. The problem of the immediate future is to undermine and destroy the economic order that supports usury, to set up an order which—like Italian fascism as Pound saw it—will inhibit full expression of emotions and talents as little as possible.

This set of ideas is what Pound's poem is “about.” Since the poem urges on us participation in political and social action, since the approach proper to “pure” poetry is irrelevant, we should not hesitate to complete our analysis of Pound's concepts as concepts instead of offering up deep but mindless stirrings of the will which Pound chiefly wishes to produce by his poem.

We need not hesitate, then, to recognize—in Pound's ideas, in the relation to them of the ideogram blocks in his poem—the sort of oversimplification or, even, detachment from reality that Pound himself—and justly—perceives in the glosses nineteenth century poetry provided for the world. Indeed, the sins of over-simplification, of detachment from complexity, which we can observe in The Cantos or in the concepts it “coerces” us to form are just as sinful as the blemishes which Pound objects to in gross idealism. Pound, to be sure, would insist on this distinction: the professed idealist's balloon is bound to earth by no more than three or four cords (concepts from which everything else in a system is inferred); whereas, there are innumerable cords binding Pound's concepts to earth. If time-binding is a fair term for describing Pound's substitute for conventional methods of abstracting, then the cords binding Pound's concepts to the earth are quite beyond numbering. For time-binding, we are told, differs from abstracting in that each concept is linked with one sensory experience and one only. True, it may closely resemble other concepts similarly tethered; but a person who binds time never goes on to commit the idealistic sin of constituting an intellectual entity from concepts that resemble each other.

If it is true then that in the mind each valid concept is linked to only one percept, Pound's trouble in The Cantos is that the ropes get badly snarled; there is, in other terms, at least an effect of abstraction and rather naïve abstraction at that. What makes for this confusion? What makes The Cantos a less subtle poem than it ought, in some lights, to be? The answer is—Pound's guiding passions—his enmity to a certain economic system; his devotion (by now secondary) to certain human powers. This latter passion, the devotion to the “human,” operates in the poem in an undiscriminating way. Pound would have no patience with the reader who preferred the concept that is linked with the “idea in action” that is John Adams to the concept connected with Malatesta. Both men are anti-usuristic. Is that not enough?

Enough, certainly, to reduce the real complexity of historical and present-day experience to a simple opposition that corresponds less to reality than to the rich contents of Pound's mind as he broods on reality, as he shapes his poem. Ironically, the trouble with the ideas that organize the poem, that are served by the method of the ideogram, is that they are too general; they tend to make the tension of the poem as much a matter of black-and-white opposition as that of heaven to hell-mouth in medieval drama. Consequently, the experience of good and evil that The Cantos forces upon our wills is one that we are constantly tempted to check or correct by our own fairly complex experience of social and cultural forms. The poem offers us an experience of good and evil inferior, for example, to experiences open to the reader of Dostoevski, where the opposition of the two forces exists even more strongly, but where brash schematization (by either author or reader) is difficult since the novels show at every turn how intimately the two forces interpenetrate in human experience. It is Pound's failure to do justice to the fact of interpenetration, of gradation, that creates (beneath the complex surface of his poem) an underlying effect of naïveté.

Pound's naïveté consists in taking a partial explanation—in many ways, a truthful one—for a complete explanation. No one can doubt that usury has contributed greatly to the inhumanity of the era in which we live; there are strong reasons for doubting that it is the only begetter of the evil which we know. We must draw back from sharing Pound's hope in its ultimate simplicity: that with the destruction of usury, we destroy the virus that is solely responsible for our sickness. There is, we suspect, much more that will have to be destroyed, nor will it be so easy to name and come at. And though we cannot doubt that a purification of language will contribute to the reconstruction of our society, we cannot hope that it will effect that reconstruction. Reconstruction, as understood by Pound, is almost exclusively a process of removing fetters, of freeing human beings from an enchanter's spell. In legend, once the spell is broken, the story is at an end; we have strong reasons for believing that, even with usury overthrown, our story would but be at a beginning. Pound, at this point, shows for a kind of Quietist, waiting for the descent of the Holy Spirit, expecting the painless emergence of a rich humanity in which we all shall share. Study of history suggests that the emergence of a full humanity in any period was a painful one, subject to chance, subject to the absence or presence of a variety of factors—certainly not made possible by the non-existence of one factor alone: usury.

But Pound, we know, is an indefatigable student of cultural history. But those studies—and The Cantos—have been invigorated by hatred rather than hope. Pound's hopes for humanity are various and not easily distinguished from each other. Only Pound's hatred is single; and it is as simplifying of reality as is the central tenet of a radically idealistic system. It is the power of the evil he attacks that gives Pound's poem focus. The “goods” that concern him are pluralistically conceived; it is a rank idealistic sin, in Pound's eyes, to try to relate one good to another. Thus, in his presentation of the good, the human objects and deeds, Pound suffers the fate that has dogged other pluralists; expression of widely scattered affections can never suggest a devotion that is either directed or intense.

A defender of Pound in toto might suggest that the poet of The Cantos does not pretend to be more than the leader of a section-crew that is making clear the track, that is removing the wreckage left on it by the nineteenth century and ours. Should one demand more? A little. There are, one might say, different ways of clearing wreckage from tracks. The single hate, the single ascription to capitalist-democracy of all our present evil, may prolong the delay of repairing past damage. It may, poetically speaking, keep the writer from rendering correctly the “idea in action”; he may, that is, finally prove inadequate to the single moment which The Cantos must present justly—fail because of the simplicity of vision we have just noted. And if the poet does not render the “idea in action” correctly, what chance is there that he will get far in the task of clearing the right of way?

Finally, cautious introspection presents to all of us the knowledge that no single moment, no “idea in action,” really exists in itself, out of contact with vividly remembered moments. Nor does Pound deny this except when he gives conscious expression to the nominalist tendency bred in him by his revolt against hypocritical idealism or (worse) the verbal self-hypnosis of some poets. One does not need to say—with an accent of medieval “realism”—that man is the rational animal. If one says merely that man is a time-binding animal (perhaps a distinction without a difference), one says in effect that man is the animal that compares, that has the habit of ranking things according to the presence or absence of pleasure or intensity. So will any reader of The Cantos continue to approach the ideograms. Such procedure Pound in some moods would repudiate as a left-hand approach to idealism. It is as if his credo would run: man should hate usury and love a multitude of goods without inhibiting the spontaneous movements of the will by the acts of judging and arranging.

It is this hope, central to Pound's thought and his poem, the hope that modern man can be made so to hate and love, that we must regard as unrealistic. Our sensibilities, “conditioned” by unreflective life in a usurious world, are doubtless corrupt. But we find in ourselves and historical record a greater variety of hates than Pound reveals. Further, we find that mankind—from hope of survival as well as to gratify a thirst for systematizing—has always submitted to a need for arranging the good and evil which he perceives in successive moments.

By saying this, we do not fall into the simplification, the abstraction, which we can perceive in Pound's presentation of evil. We continue, rather, to be aware that men are just as curious about the interrelations of good and evil, of good and good, of evil and evil, as they are about the possible division between good and evil which is the intellectual capital on which Pound's poem draws. This continuing curiosity is as much a “fact” about mankind as each moment in itself, each “idea in action.” It is a fact that Pound ignores, a taste that his poem is not designed to satisfy. His neglect is natural; complex, involved curiosity never sorts well with prophetic fervor, whether the fervor be Jeremiah's or Ezra Pound's. Yet this is the very play of curiosity that continues as we read The Cantos, a poem devoted to the celebration of a division; and Pound cannot legislate this curiosity out of existence. It contributes to the judgment one passes on the poem, as an imitation of reality, as a source of “renewing” reality.

If this analysis of the “effect” of reading The Cantos is just, what is that effect? One of freezing inertia. Shall we say that the will (much less the intelligence) is not moved on the terms that Pound permits and presents in his poem? What the poem presents us is a sharp perception of hate or the hateful balanced by no more than an omnibus, cultivated, eclectic perception of good. This good, upon acquaintance, becomes (for all the specificity with which it is revealed) as vague and unsatisfying as “The Good” in some nineteenth century systems. It may occur to us that Pound is expecting a great miracle indeed from his poem; for nowhere, to date, do we find a society that resisted evil, tramped it to earth, on the basis of an omnibus, undiscriminating perception of good. The most, in this sort, that we find to date is a poem, Ezra Pound's The Cantos.

It is a poem for which we should be grateful. It is the record of a negative criticism of our society that we should not ignore. It is the record of a real (if ultimately somewhat frustrated) struggle with the interrelated artistic and political problems which our period presented one poet. But not only one poet. For these same problems of renewing the techniques of poetry, of renewing the society which poetry serves, will become intimately ours the more we think of the mode of existence, of solution, they had when they were Pound's. However qualified our assent to the special answers Pound worked out, we know that Pound has a claim to great distinction—and not just because he has bent his vision on these problems and no others for a great many years. We may feel that an intransigent nominalist pose is more confining than Pound believed; we may think—possibly thanks to his negative demonstration—that making things new requires a more sensitive and various response to experience than The Cantos records. We may decide that at certain points Pound was self-deceived. But we cannot believe that central to his career is an intent to deceive us. We should see by now that the “truth” about Ezra Pound and The Cantos is—wholly or in part—the truth about matters that ought to be our first concern: the estate of poetry in our culture, the role of language in that culture, the sort of belief needful if that culture is to survive and unfold, the conditions under which belief of any sort is arrived at. This is the gift which Ezra Pound offers the country which he left; it should countervail much that is urged against him.