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By Root 873 0

come to a slight disparity in Pound’s idea of order. There is a strange phrase in his prose writings—strange, at least, if we set it beside this other one about “contagion”—and that phrase is “the will toward order.” Virtù is not the same thing as willpower, but for Pound it is the will that directs the force of virtù and in the last analysis, therefore, it is the will that is the agent of order. In the context from which I have taken the phrase, “the will toward order” refers to social order and to the men through whose will societies have developed and maintained their structures. But willpower plays a role in Pound’s aesthetic as well: “The greater the artist the more permanent his creation, and this is a matter of WILL,” he writes, a sentence that belongs beside Clark Emery’s explication: “Without Eleusinian energy civilizations would not rise, without Kungian order they dissipate themselves.” I am not, at this point, trying to address the validity of these ideas. I am only trying to point out that, for Pound, Confucian order is associated with two things, willpower and durability. The will is the agent of the forces of order, and durability is the consequence of its agency.

We shall have more to say of political will in a later section of this chapter; at this point I want to offer a few remarks on the role of willpower in art. There are at least two phases in the completion of a work of art, one in which the will is suspended and another in which it is active. The suspension is primary. It is when the will is slack that we feel moved or we are struck by an event, intuition, or image. The materia must begin to flow before it can be worked, and not only is the will powerless to initiate that flow, but it actually seems to interfere, for artists have traditionally used devices—drugs, fasting, trances, sleep deprivation, dancing—to suspend the will so that something “other” will come forward. When the material finally appears, it is usually in a jumble, personally moving, perhaps, but not much use to someone else—not, at any rate, a work of art. There are exceptions, but the initial formulation of a work is rarely satisfactory—satisfactory, I mean, to the imagination itself, for, like a person who must struggle to say what he means, the imagination stutters toward the clear articulation of its feeling. The will has the power to carry the material back to the imagination and contain it there while it is re-formed. The will does not create the “germinating image” of a work, nor does it give the work its form, but it does provide the energy and the directed attention called for by a dialogue with the imagination.

Artists might be classified by the different weight given to these two phases of the work. Whitman or a prose writer like Jack Kerouac fall on the suspend-the-will side of the spectrum. Whitman begins to work by lolling on the grass. Kerouac’s “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”—a list of thirty aphorisms—includes the following:

Submissive to everything, open listening

Something that you feel will find its own form

Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind

No time for poetry but exactly what is

In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you

Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better.

All these and one more—“Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better”—amount to an aesthetic of the imagination without the will, the “spontaneous bop prosody” of accepting the image as it comes. (Yeats’s trance writing would be another example, the one, in fact, that Kerouac credits as his model.) “Never revise” was Kerouac’s rule; he used to claim that he wrote the first draft of On the Road on a roll of teletype paper in a single two-week sitting, sniffing Benzedrine inhalers as he typed. Such writing is both more original and more chaotic than writing with a larger admixture of will. It is more personal and more of the moment. At its best it strengthens the imagination through trusting its primary speech and conveys that trust to the reader, along with the “crazy