The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [130]
The oral tradition—stories, songs, poems passed from mouth to mouth— keeps the gift of speech alive. The poet Gary Snyder, asked in an interview why the oral tradition is so weak in the United States, answered: “Because of the stress on individual names and the emphasis on keeping a text pure.”
Each of these preoccupations—the one a concern of the market, the other a concern of the academy—treats our art as proprietary works, not gifts.
* This is one reason we cannot read an artist’s work by his life. We learn something when we read the life, of course, but the true artist leaves us with the uncanny sense that the experience fails to explain the creation.
* As it is, for example, in Mao Tse-tung’s political aesthetic where “work in literature and art… is subordinated to the revolutionary tasks set by the Party…”
* Justin Kaplan, Whitman’s most recent biographer, says that Whitman’s symptoms suggest severe hypertension and, perhaps, mercury poisoning from overdoses of calomel.
CHAPTER TEN
Ezra Pound and
the Fate of
Vegetable Money
I • Scattered Light
“The images of the gods,” wrote Ezra Pound, “… move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the undivided light.” But those who turn to face either the poetry or the political economy of Ezra Pound will find no such light to guide them there. Something has scattered it in all directions, and it is this scattering to which we shall have to address ourselves if we are to speak of Pound.
Born in 1885, seven years before Whitman died, Pound grew up in the vicinity of Philadelphia, where his father was an assayer at the U.S. Mint. He attended the University of Pennsylvania and, briefly, Hamilton College in upstate New York. After graduation, Pound taught at Wabash College in Indiana, but not for long: his landlady one morning discovered an “actress” in his rooms and reported the discovery to the college authorities. They suggested that he marry the girl or leave. He left. He left the country, in fact, and but for two brief visits did not return until the end of the Second World War, when the U.S. government flew him home to charge him with treason for having taken the side, vocally, of the Axis powers during the war.
During the course of his long career (he did not die until 1972) Ezra Pound came to promulgate an elaborate economic theory and to write, among many other things, an eight hundred–page sequence of poems, the Cantos. In order to describe the work and fate of this poet we could tell either of these stories, the one about art or the one about politics. It is the politics that will receive most of our attention here, but by that emphasis we shall not be slighting the poetry entirely, for in telling one story we will be giving at least an outline of the other. They have the same plot, it seems to me: the playing out of an opposition in Pound’s own temperament between forces of fertility and forces of order, or, to use slightly different terms, between two powers of the soul, imagination and will. Several people have made this point, but I think Clark Emery was the first, putting it in the language that Pound himself might have used: “One of the tensions [in the Cantos] … is the effort to bring together the Eleusinian (or Dionysian) concept of natural fecundity and the Confucian concept of human order … Without Eleusinian energy civilizations would not rise, without Kungian order they dissipate themselves. Civilization occurs and maintains itself when the two forces—the striving and the ordering—approach equipoise.”