The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [143]
But what is the fate of affection and imagination if, whenever we are drawn in their direction, we must pass a stranger collecting tolls?
Usura slayeth the child in the womb
It stayeth the young man’s courting
It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth
between the young bride and her bridegroom.
Once goodwill has been separated from its vehicles, matter will increase without spirit. Objects will begin to appear that carry no social or spiritual feeling, though they are the product of human hands.
It rusteth the craft and the craftsman.
It gnaweth the thread in the loom.
We may address ourselves to Imagism in slightly different terms now. If, in turning toward the imagination, you begin with Pound’s demand for concrete speech (and with the spiritual ends of that demand), or if you begin with William Carlos Williams’s “no ideas but in things,” or with T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative,” and if the date on the calendar is 1914, you are in a fix. For when all exterior objects can be sold at will, when usury has found a home even in the family food and clothing, then the objects of the outer world can no longer carry the full range of emotional and spiritual life. Feeling and spirit mysteriously drain away when the imagination tries to embody them in commodities. Certainly this is part of the melancholy in those poems of Eliot’s in which men and women are surrounded by coffee spoons and cigarettes but cannot speak to one another. The Waste Land could be a gloss on Marx’s declaration that “the only comprehensible language which we can speak to each other … is not that of ourselves, but only that of our commodities and their mutual relations.” The imagination senses that packs of cigarettes or cafeteria trays are not emanations of eros. Some spirit other than the creative spirit attended to their manufacture. There is a line of modern poets who have continued to work with such materials, accepting (or not feeling) the limited amount of emotional and spiritual life in the poem. But another group of modern poets—and Eliot and Pound belong here—admitted the tension of lost life to their writing, allowing the missing vitality to disturb the surface of the poem. And some of these artists turned outward, drawn toward those ideologies that promised to limit the domain of the commodity. They undertook, in short, the redemption of the imagination, and their task led them, willy-nilly, into politics. Poets as disparate in temperament as Pound, Neruda, and Vallejo all began with a strong pull toward “thinking in images”; all found themselves brought up short, and all turned toward politics.
Before we go much further, however, we must tell two more anecdotes in which Ezra Pound gives a gift—two stories that take us a step closer to the style in which this particular poet moved from poetry to political economy.
In the late 1920s, W. B. Yeats, “forbidden Dublin winters” by his health, stayed a season in Rapallo, the Italian town where Pound and his wife had finally settled. The two men were not at ease with each other. Unsure of his own work for the moment, Yeats showed a new verse play to Pound, who returned it with a one-word comment written across the front: “Putrid!” Pound would talk nothing but politics. In A Vision, Yeats recalls their evening walks:
Sometimes about ten O’Clock at night I accompany him to a street where there are hotels upon one side, upon the other palm-trees and the sea, and there, taking out of his pocket bones and pieces of meat, he begins to call the cats. He knows all their histories—the brindled cat looked like a skeleton until he began to feed it; that fat grey cat is an hotel proprietor’s favourite, it never begs from the guests’ tables and it turns cats that do not belong to the hotel out of the garden; this black cat and that grey cat over there fought on the roof of a four-storied house some weeks ago, fell