The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [136]
That was 1948. Imagine Pound a half a century earlier! His moment of light would have come sometime before 1908. The turn of the century was hardly a time of great spiritual awakening in America. American mercantile expansion was at its height, running from China, where the Boxer Rebellion had just been put down, to a South America newly “freed” from Spain. A Rough Rider sat in the White House, and hardly a single great poet was alive and read on the American continent with the exception, I suppose, of Teddy Roosevelt’s preferred bard, Edwin Arlington Robinson. I do not mean to ascribe all of Pound’s bitterness to exterior sources, but even if his struggles are more aptly described as interior, we cannot say his countrymen offered him much solace.
In any event, I was led to imagine a Poundian epiphany such as this in order to fill the gap, to make sense of the odd combination of erotic intent and divisive tone that we find in the work. The little story in Pavannes and Divagations caught my eye because it speaks of the bitterness of lost worth and of a spiritual knowledge that could not be passed along. And although the faith in fertility can be seen in flashes, it is bitterness and disappointment that live on the surface of Ezra Pound’s poetry.
Like Whitman, Pound knew very well that he had not been born into a world receptive to the spirit of his art.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
He never accepted the barrenness of his age, and there is no reason that he should have. But he never accepted, either, the limits of his ability to do anything about that barrenness. There is only so much that can be done to create fertile ground where none exists. Harmony may emanate from the unity of nature or the nous or the prince, but harmony cannot be imposed on those who are not ready to receive it. Electro-magnetism may trace a rose in iron filings, but it is powerless to induce order into sawdust. The forces of fertility have no power in certain situations, and it is in Pound’s response to that powerlessness, it seems to me, that we shall find the true roots of the tension between fecundity and order, imagination and will. Pound’s notion that we slump into “stupidity” from “laziness” implies its opposite, that we shall overcome it through hard work. Where Whitman senses that the ends of art call for long periods of idleness, Pound imagines that they might be accomplished through discipline and exertion. He is like a man who, unable to grieve upon discovering that his wife no longer loves him, becomes more and more aggressive in the dumb belief that love could be forced back into existence. Pound’s Confucian side is marked not only by willfulness, but by a willfulness exaggerated in direct proportion to his frustration with the powerlessness of the erotic.
We can see some of this in Pound’s reading of history. In its barest formulation the idea of “Kungian order” seems like an anarchist ideal, order spread not by coercion but “by a sort of contagion.” In practice, however, those who are drawn to Confucius usually end up working for the state government (or running it). The proverbial advice in China is that during the years when a man is a civil servant he should study Confucius; later, when he retires, he should study Buddhism. Why? It seems that when Confucius turned inward he discovered the “right order” of a state bureaucrat (or maybe it was the bureaucrats who discovered him; either way, there is a connection). When the anarchist speaks of an inner, natural, noncoercive order, he does not suddenly leap to: “If the prince has order within him he can put his