When arguing with my peers about Pound and my belief that a bad poet cannot write good poetry, a gulf has opened and I feel terribly lonely; no one accepts “only good produces good,” my premise, or even pretends to understand it. To understand it is to agree with me—how can the bad be good?—so how do I make them understand? How do I impress upon them that the good is good, and cannot be bad? Personally, I cannot move without being greeted by the good—it informs my meditations and my hopes—but behind it lurks the bad: death, loss, the grinning contrarian.
The trouble I am having, I think, is with the very argument itself—one for our times. It points to something so large we cannot see it—the Good. It is like God, a concept whose very size prohibits comfortable and intimate understanding.
Let me present as best I can the argument against me.
Tom. We are not comfortable with your thesis…it has a strong religious smell around it…you are the holy idiot which the smart, secular, set must keep at arm’s length. This “good is good” idea of yours is too simple; you are forcing us to apologize for something (the bad) which has within it energy, mystery, duality, room, flexibility, perception, calculation, and pleasure. We cannot give that up or seek forgiveness for it. Whenever we gaze at your Good—this good which produces the good—it goes out of focus. You have only concepts: the vague idea that the good is good and the bad is bad—and somehow they cannot mix. Even on a conceptual level your argument seems inflexible and naive. Meanwhile, we present not concepts, but Pound (and we know he had bad in him) and the poems (which we know has good in them). To cleanse Pound (you haven’t the power) you would need to cleanse the poems—and we don’t want you to do that.
I cannot listen to such arguments.
First, I will judge Pound’s poems, not the other way around. My conceptual integrity (good is good, bad is bad) is no hindrance to my close and intimate reading of Pound’s specific poems, Pound’s specific behaviors and how others have judged and defended them.
Second, my definition of bad and good as that which will not be mixed—by definition they will not be mixed—does not prevent my perception of their mixture in the greater world.
Third, this “holy fool,” “religious” whiff you’re getting is simply the result of your own lack of sophistication on the matter; the person who attempts to understand the world from the highest or the most removed, abstract, perspective, is practicing philosophy, not religion—the reason the two were once, for all practical purposes, the same, is that the lens of highest perspective and the God-lens are both great study aids.
Perspective is always good. The bad lacks it.
Energy and flexibility could be the wriggling of what is trapped and in despair. Perspective will tell us that. The hard-to-understand might be bollox or it might contain insight. Perspective (another name for the good) will tell us that. The dire straits of the worm is the thrill at the center of any adventure story; the serene perch of the eagle may be boring, by comparison, but perspective owns the thrill; the trapped only suffer it.
Criticism is more difficult than poetry. Criticism, to be good, must be thorough. A poem is not bound by thoroughness. We love a poem precisely because it is an intellectual act which relieves us of the obligation to be thorough. A poem acts on us, literally, in seconds. Think of your favorite Emily Dickinson poem, or the “petals on a black bough” poem of Pound, or the wheel barrow poem by Pound’s friend William Carlos Williams. The curtain is coming down even as it is going up, in such performances. There is no expectation of thoroughness at all. A lecture by a critic keeps the curtain waiting.
We cannot be as the poem when we speak on the poem; the poem’s gravity, as strong at it is to us, when we feel that particular poem is good, a gravity of silent and speechless force, weakens when we listen to the critic’s words telling us why the poem is good. The poem’s wit has no words, even as wit belongs to words. This is the “thoroughness” of the good poem—it makes words useless altogether. The great poem would make the critic and his words unnecessary.
Still, criticism must use words and must be thorough, even if the advertisements and the poems succeed thoroughly and powerfully in another manner even in the same city where the critic wearily resides.
But what if the critic is seduced? Why shouldn’t the critic be seduced? Critics live with poets (they are often companions) and the poets seduce with mere cries—the seconds it takes to glimpse a red wheel barrow scene—and now what is thoroughness but a dream? I will be a critic—go on stage, wearing my suit and tie, talk for an hour or two, on what? it doesn’t really matter—the trustees of the college only ask that I am sober.
There was once Greek and Latin, but no English poetry, taught in the schools; and yet English poets of genius were produced.
The Relationship between Big and Small is the essence of all instruction and learning.
The good which is Big is too big to see. And the bad…
Here are the war broadcasts.
Here are the Cantos.
Here are petals on a bough.
Class dismissed.