Ezra Pound, Poet. Volume II Quotes

“breaking of the celebratory mood. For George Kearns, one of the most perceptive of Pound’s readers,”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Said Mr RothSchild, hell knows which Roth-schild 1861, ’64 or there sometime, ‘Very few people ‘will understand this. Those who do will be occupied ‘getting profits. The general public will probably not ‘see it’s against their interest.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“and powerful towards both the people and the state. He reaffirms the basic cause of ‘our revolution’, No taxation without representation; he insists that government revenue ‘be kept under public control’ and not be given over to the banks to speculate with; and he endorses President Jackson’s saying ‘No where so well deposited as in the pants of the people, | Wealth ain’t’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“HIC | JACET | FISCI LIBERATOR’, ‘here lies the Treasury’s Liberator’. However, in Senator Thomas Hart Benton’s fully documented account of the Bank war, in his Thirty Years’ View, or A History of the Working of the American Government (1854), the hero is unquestionably President Jackson, and Van Buren is not seen to play a leading role, in part because while Vice-President he chaired the Senate Debates and could have no voice in them. (That difference raises the question of historical accuracy to which I will return.) The first third of canto 37 weaves together thirty or more items, most of them things said by Van Buren or taken up by him over the many years from 1813 when he was a New York state senator to 1840 when he was President. The passage is a prime instance of Pound’s method of adding one detail to another without providing the conventional syntactical and logical connections, in order to allow a more complex web of relations to develop. Banks fraudulently failing, wealthy landowners and factory owners, high judges and the Chief Justice himself, senators, financial speculators, all are implicated in defrauding immigrants of the value of their banknotes, in driving settlers off the land they would cultivate, in denying workers the vote, in preventing local government of local affairs, and in ‘“decrying government credit. |…in order to feed on the spoils”’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Canto 37 contains the major episode in Pound’s treatment of the American Revolution in this suite of cantos: the critical war for supremacy between the effectively private Bank of the United States and President Jackson representing the people of the United States. The war was carried on in the Senate, in the financial economy, and in the press from 1829 to 1835. Pound took as his principal source for that part of the canto The Autobiography of Martin Van Buren (published in 1918). Van Buren (1788–1862) was Secretary of State and then Vice-President (1833–7) to Andrew Jackson, and succeeded him as President (1837–41). Pound credited him with having been the brains behind Jackson’s saving the nation by freeing the Treasury from the despotism of the Bank,”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“the principles of Jeffersonian democracy, principles which he still steadfastly defended— The world, the flesh, the devils in hell are Against any man who now in the North American Union shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade…”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Canto 34 goes back in time to the beginnings of that betrayal. Pound condensed into seven printed pages Allan Nevins’s 575-page Diary of John Quincy Adams (1928),”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“That is of course a purely eighteenth-century, patriarchal, and un-Native American model of civilization. One might even call it European, if it were not that the monarchical European way, in Jefferson’s view, was ‘to keep [the people] down’ by hard labour, poverty, ignorance,”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Jefferson would civilize the Indians, but not in ‘the ancient ineffectual’ way of religious conversion— The following has been successful. First, to raise cattle whereby to acquire a sense of the value of property… arithmetic to compute that value, thirdly writing, to keep accounts, and here they begin to labour; enclose farms, and the women to weave and spin… fourth to read Aesop’s Fables, which are their first delight along with Robinson Crusoe. Creeks, Cherokees, the latter now instituting a government.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“A time of speaking, | A time of silence. The resonant phrases are from Ecclesiastes, and they go with the Preacher’s exhortation, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.’ Speak, act, while you have time in this world of vanities, is the Preacher’s message. Jefferson’s saying ‘It wd. have given us time’ rhymes with that, and with both time and speaking, not to the ear but to the understanding. A feeling for the time is there again in ‘“modern dress for your [i.e. Washington’s] statue”’. Speaking and acting in time modulates in the following lines through ‘remember having written you…water communication…information…a canal | navigation…better information…a communication of it…T. J. to General Washington, 1787’. Those lines compose an ‘intellectual complex’ or vortex and generate a general idea of constructive communications at a particular moment in time.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Pound firmly dismissed the ragbag reaction in an interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1968, and at the same time he raised the possibility of an unprosaic approach. ‘They say they are chosen at random, but that’s not the way it is’, he said, ‘It’s music. Musical themes that find each other out.’ He had evidently attempted to explain this to Yeats, but without much success. ‘Can impressions that are in part visual, in part metrical, be related like the notes of a symphony,’ Yeats had queried sceptically in the introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936), or ‘has the author been carried beyond reason by a theoretical conception?”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“An early reviewer of Cantos XXXI–XLI in the New York Nation amused himself with the conceit of Mr Pound taking correspondence courses in such subjects as ‘History of the U.S. Treasury from the Revolution to the Civil War (from the Original Documents)’ and making notes diligently on small pieces of paper which a gust of wind scattered over the hills about Rapallo, and which he then picked up and sent to the printer as he found them.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“They are composed of what Jefferson actually said and wrote, and of what his friends and fellow founders of the United States of North America, Madison and John Adams and John Quincy Adams and the rest, actually said and wrote. Pound invented nothing, put no words into their mouths. What he did was to select passages, or, more often, phrases, from their correspondence with each other and from their journals or state records, and set them down item by item. Sometimes the source and context is indicated, but often not; and how one item might relate to another is left to the reader to fathom.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Said Mr Jefferson: ‘It wd. have given us time.’ ‘modern dress for your statue… ‘I remember having written you while Congress sat at Annapolis, ‘on water communication between ours and the western country, ‘particularly the information…of the plain between ‘Big Beaver and Cuyahoga, which made me hope that a canal ‘…navigation of Lake Erie and the Ohio. You must have had ‘occasion of getting better information on this subject ‘and if you wd. oblige me ‘by a communication of it. I consider this canal, ‘if practicable, as a very important work. T. J. to General Washington, 1787 …no slaves north of Maryland district… …flower found in Connecticut that vegetates when suspended in air…. …screw more effectual if placed below surface of water. Those details at the opening of canto 31 are all, apart from the Latin lines, from the historical record, mostly from the ‘ten fat volumes’ of The Writings of Thomas Jefferson which Eliot had been given by his father and had passed on to Pound.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.’ Behind that lies the principle of le mot juste; but for the poet there is more to it than the accurate word; there must be justice also in the arrangement of the words and in their tones and rhythms. That sort of justice, the natural justice of language, does not come naturally. It was as much as he could do, it was like forging pokers, Pound told another young poet, Mary Barnard, ‘to get economic good and evil into verbal manifestation, not abstract, but so that the monetary system is as concrete as fate and not an abstraction’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.’ Behind that lies the principle of le mot juste;”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Never has been a LONG hortatory poem’, Pound advised John Hargrave, the leader of the Green Shirts, a militant wing of Social Credit: ‘Epic…is not incitement to IMMEDIATE act/ you tell the tale to direct the auditor toward admiration of certain nobilities, courage etc.’ Or, putting it another way, this time to Basil Bunting as a fellow poet, ‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“said, ‘They tried to break me and didn’t or couldn’t.’ But ‘hatred can be bred in the mind’, and ‘head-born hatred is possibly the most virulent’. He had come to understand that the source of the harm done to the arts was the unjust distribution of credit at the heart of the capitalist economic system. And that, evidently, was why he nursed his virulent hatred of the bankers and plutocrats and politicians whom he held responsible for obstructing the flow of creative intelligence in England and France and America.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Deeper than his rage there was his hatred, a murderous hatred, as he himself declared, for a murdering capitalism. ‘What causes the ferocity and bad manners of revolutionaries?’, he asked rhetorically in an essay in Eliot’s Criterion in July 1933, ‘Why should a peace-loving writer of Quaker descent be quite ready to shoot certain persons whom he never laid eyes on?…What has capital done that I should hate Andy Mellon as a symbol or as a reality?’ The direct answer was this, ‘I have blood lust because of what I have seen done to, and attempted against, the arts in my time.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“He insisted on absolute silence, no sound being allowed in from the piazza outside, and if a fly buzzed he called for it to be swatted. It was into this room that Pound was brought for his audience with Mussolini at 17.30 on Monday, 30 January 1933. Pound presented to Mussolini a copy of the Hours Press A Draft of XXX Cantos and opened it to show him the Malatesta cantos. But, as Pound later told Mary de Rachewiltz, he ‘went poking around till he got to Trotsk and the zhamefull beace’ in canto 16, and said—he was learning English at the time—‘But this is not English’, and Pound said, ‘No, it’s my idea of the way a continental Jew would speak English’, and that led Mussolini to say, ‘How entertaining!’, ‘Ma qvesto è divertente’. Pound would put that remark into canto 41, and tell a correspondent that ‘One of [my] most valued readers seemed to find the Cantos entertaining; at least that’s what he said after 20 minutes, with accent of relieved surprise,”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“with large trunk full of highbrow books (Spengler etc.)’, and Pound read The Decline of the West ‘in return for tips on XV century’. He told his father that ‘As S. seems to mean by “The West” a lot of things I dislike, I shd. like to accept his infantine belief that they are “declining”’;”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Olga Rudge told a story about Wanda Landowska, the renowned harpsichordist. Landowska had been interrupted in mid-sentence by the arrival of friends and a fuss about tickets, and had come back after a quarter of an hour and continued her sentence from where she left off. ‘Is it the working with different voices in the fugues etc. makes her able to keep all the threads in her hand separate and distinct?’, Olga wondered, ‘like in a way the cantos?”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“He had recorded in canto 8 how Plato the Idealist ‘went to Dionysius of Syracuse | Because he had observed that tyrants | Were most efficient in all that they set their hands to’; but had he taken the point of the story, that Plato found ‘he was unable to persuade Dionysius to any amelioration’?”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“When his association with L’Indice ended in December 1931—the paper apparently ‘went bust’—he intensified his effort to play an active part in the literary and cultural life of Italy by getting a local vortex going in Rapallo. With Gino Saviotti and half a dozen other collaborators, notably Basil Bunting, Pound organised a ‘Supplemento Letterario’ which appeared every other week as an insert in Rapallo’s weekly paper, Il Mare. For eight months, from August 1932 to March 1933, it was a two-page supplement, and then, from April to July 1933, was reduced to a single ‘Pagina Letteraria’. The promise that it would reappear in October 1933, after taking a summer holiday, ‘with, as always, the collaboration of the best Italian and foreign writers’, was not kept. In its first phase the ‘Supplemento’ was determinedly international, with contributions from and about Italian, French, Spanish, German, and American writers and writing, and could claim to be giving a local focus to the most innovative and avant-garde work of its time. Pound contributed occasional ‘Appunti’, and recycled his Little Review ‘Study of French Poets’ and his notes on Vorticism. In one of his ‘Appunti’ he asserted that Futurism, the best of which satisfied the demands of Vorticism, had to be the dominant art of ‘l’Italia Nuova’.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“An aristocracy often dictates, it rules as long as it is composed of the strongest elements i.e. as long as it maintains its sense of the present. One might almost say as long as it maintains its news sense. Both the communist party in Russia and the Fascist party in Italy are examples of aristocracy, active. They are the best, the pragmatical, the aware, the most thoughtful, the most wilful elements in their nations.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“the democratic idea’ would not necessarily lead to the idea of ‘the great protagonist’ either; and further, that ‘the great protagonists’ in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“The democratic idea’, he had pointed out, ‘was not that legislative bodies shd. represent the momentary idiocy of the multitude.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“THE SANE METHOD OF STUDYING HISTORY consists (or wd. if it were ever practised, consist) in learning what certain great protagonists intended, and to what degree they failed in forcing their program on the mass. For example:…J. Q. Adams’ intention of conserving national wealth for purposes of national education and civilization… Jefferson’s continual struggle to import civilization from Europe (getting measurements of la Maison Carrée…)”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“There are also of course the counter-themes: that there are muddy states of mind, irresponsible rulers, brutal wars; and that unenlightenment is the norm. The drama of this epic is the struggle of a few individuals throughout history to establish an enlightened order amidst and against blank apathy, malignant stupidity, rapacious greed, and jealous possessiveness, while (in Yeats’s words) ‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst | Are full of passionate intensity’. The war at Troy lies behind the Cantos from the start as the archetypal instance of possessiveness leading to catastrophe.”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years

“Those indications, taken together, provide an abstract of the major themes or preoccupations of the Cantos in general, and of A Draft of XXX Cantos in particular: – above all and through everything a preoccupation with ‘problems of conduct’, as in the Ta Hio (digested in Canto 13); – specifically, a concern for the ascendancy of intelligence over brute force; – then that the intelligent should develop the sense of civic responsibility; – and beyond that, the life of the spirit, or the divine states of mind which move men to benevolent and constructive action; – with a concern always with ‘where have we got to now?”
― A. David Moody, Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years