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The Gift: Chapter 10 - The Life of Ezra Pound
🕑 Added 2025-09-24 17:44:54 +0000 UTC
What does it say about me that I enjoyed the chapter about the facist antisemetic traitor more htan the equanamious tragic gay
The fascist who goes in on it in the name of art I guess is just a bit archetypically attractive to my disposition, the crippling racism notwithstanding. Oh well, let's look at this life of misguided bigotry and passion!
"Pound was firmly set in the habit of delivering his opinions without the benefit of elaboration."
.....:::......,,,,,;;;;;;;;;----+
Love this evocative description of the, fertile, ambiguous, mysterious image:
The liquid light, the nous, the fecundity of nature, the feeling of the soul in ascent—only the imagination can articulate our apprehension of these things, and the imagination speaks to us in images.
"The feeling of the soul in ascent" is such an obvious and concise way to describe the effect of art, that thing to be in pursuit of.
I didn't perfectly understand the fascism economics, but I do admire this sort of thinking abotu economics that reinserts spirit into the mix, the exercise of human control over the monetary system isntead of letting it drag you along:
To tell you the truth, I simply don't know much at all about Mussolini except that he's bad? So I guess I need to like go listen to a podcast about him now in this neverending process of filling in history.
Lewis Hyde has a strong talent for narrativizing an artists life, seemingly related to his talent in interpreting fairy tales:
Pound's gift of the Cantos to the Boss concretizes and marks the moment when the imagination is given over to the will. In 1933 Pound literally handed Song over to Authority, a gift that cannot but break its own spirit, for neither the gift nor the imagination can survive as servants of the will toward order.
Like Hyde's fairy tale analysis, I immediately feel a bit of kickback, thinking "hey now lets not be too sure about our personal interpretations of stories that are not ours", but this resistanc eis overcoem by a sense of "well that makes 1000% sense though"
With our two poet biographies, I think it also just seems well within taste to narrativize these artists who were extremely prone to narrativizing their own lives. There's the ugly invasive sort of interpretation and then there's the interpretation that is just faithfully taking everything that the artist is desperately pouring out into the universe, which is quite flattering and makes one feel seen. I've gotten this before, and it feels like what Whitman and Pound got here.
When Ezra's antisemetism enters the fray it goes so in such a fury lol, with a crazed chaos that Hyde effectively frames as chaotic, crazy and (most importantly) unartistic.
His own daughter describes him with the vicious empathy that daughters have in describing their racist dads: "his own tongue was tricking him, running away with him, leading him into excess, away from his pivot, into blind spots"
Hyde's own description a moment later I feel diagnoses a lot of this right wing christian facism that is so in vogue now:
Rambling, erratic, frustrated, full of an anger uncut by humor, humility, or compassion, they fatigue the reader and leave a bitter taste.
I love this one quote, reminds me of the analysis I did of Jordan Peterson's postmodern neomarxism:
Pound's ideas emerged so helter-skelter, so full of obsession and so stained with their maker's breath that to make of them a coherent ideology is to do a work that Pound himself never did and, therefore, equally to falsify the story.
And finally just the craziest roast:
Pound could write an entire Money Pamphlet with sufficient cogent ideas to make his argument discussable, but then on the last page suddenly say that "the Jewspapers and worse than Jewspapers" have been hiding the facts from the public.
A1 summary of The Shadow, re existential kink for thsoe who celebrate:
“What the ego needs but cannot accept the psyche will personify and either present in dreams or project onto someone in the outer world. These shadow figures then become objects of simultaneous fascination and disgust—a recurrent and troubling figure in dreams or someone in the neighbourhood we don’t like but can’t stop talking about. (Lewis Hyde, The Gift p. 247)
The whole analysis of Hermes was very stirring, and it was fascinating to take that god as related to the powerful antisemetic mythological concept of Jewishness. I grew up in a Christian community that was veyr happly interfaith with Sikh's and Jews, and kind of just never got exposed to whatever the hatred towards Jews was supposed to be about, so it tended to perplex tf out of me and my brother. Obviously as it's risen in society (-_-) I've unfortanately grown to build a little theory of Mind for the antisemite and this Hermes thing at least describes the very ugly mental construction.
Then inbetween this bile and poison there are these moments where I really resonate with Pound!
...the arch criminal for Pound is the man who makes sure that value is detached from its concrete embodiment and then "plays the gap" between symbol and object, between abstract money and embodied wealth. Either the swindler fools the public into using a phantom currency and then grows rich on its increase, or else he gets a monopoly (either on a particular commodity or, better, on the actual symbol of value) and stirs up the market, inducing fluctuations int he relationship between embodied and symbolic value and getting rich playing the one against the other. All the crimes that Pound warns us against come down to one: to profit on the alienation of the symbol from the real.
So fair Pound! Is the next thing you say gonna be about the Jewspapers... :/ its 2013 Kanye turning into 2020s Kanye all over again
The same way I'd talk about Kanye (in private), Hyde has such empathy for the engine that drives Pound in his cruel politics.
Pound would like to reattach the symbols to their objects... The poet of Imagism longs to have symbolic value equal imaginative value. That would be justice.
It was very emotional to come to Allen Ginsberg's account at the end and hear Ezra use his own hatred for stupidity against himself:
"my own work does not make sense." . . . "A mess," he said... "My writing—stupidity and ignorance all the way through," he said. "Stupidity and ignorance."
Next week last week! Conclusion and Afterward. See you there.
Comments
benedict.m
Even while reading this chapter, I couldn't imagine that I would be moved almost to tears by the end of it. I don't really know Pound at all, so I'm grateful that Hyde paints such a rich picture of him here. Like Phil mentioned, I don't know exactly what to call the pain or failure Pound experienced that turned inward and poisoned him for so much of his life. But at the same time I feel like I get it. I think he had a sense of himself, of the kind of artist he wanted to be, that didn't align with his actual sensibility as an artist, and which was probably impossible to fulfill. The excerpts of his poetry in this chapter feel profoundly self-conscious, like he's writing *from* this sense of his own simultaneous grandiosity and inadequacy. I suspect that there's no art Pound could have made that would have satisfied him. Something in his temperament or his circumstances feels inclined inescapably toward bitterness. It feels recursive. ((it's like when I feel like nobody likes me, which makes me less good to be around, which becomes a trait to dislike myself for, which makes me feel nobody else likes me, etc etc etc)) I think he sensed his own bitterness and dissatisfaction with himself, but didn't know how to properly feel that, much less express it healthily. And those feelings just propagated themselves and grew exponentially; Hyde is right to clock his rampant antisemitism as a kind of projected self-hatred, a casting of his shadow onto an easy scapegoat. So much of this chapter is so, *so* ugly that it's almost funny. When Pound is ranting in all caps, coming up with his own creative slurs and racist theology, you can practically see him foaming at the mouth. I want to laugh at how over the top he is, but mostly it's just heavy and sad. I don't want to have the ironic reaction of laughing at it. I think it's truer to sincerely feel the dull horror of witnessing the foaming torrent of hate this man spent most of his life as. It's an understatement to say I wasn't expecting to get to the moment Ginsberg recounts at the end. And weirdly I find myself a little suspicious of it. Not to say Ginsberg might be straight up lying or something, but it's weird to me how perfectly it rehabilitates Pound's image: he recants his antisemitism, he says his art was dumb and bad, he's sheepish and humble where for most of his life he was a brash, smug asshole. Ultimately I do believe this story. But it's interesting to notice that I had (have?) trouble believing it. It's moving for the same reason it feels improbable: how often does this happen? How often does someone who spent so much of their life and work spewing bigotry and supporting fascism turn around near the end and finally understand themselves? How many of us have wished that would happen with dying family members, only to be disappointed? But the unlikely does happen, sometimes. And when I read this section I was staggered by the grace Ginsberg offers Ezra. He doesn't meet his bad politics with good politics, he breaks the cycle and just sees him. An old man, fallen into silence, into a hell of his own making, repentant. I'm not sure how to express how beautiful I find this. Ginsberg chooses to try to show Pound that even though he never satisfied himself, even though he never reached the essence he sought, that doesn't mean his art didn't touch *an* essence, it doesn't mean his life was wasted. I don't think he could have truly heard this earlier in his life. Only as a sad old man could he have learned to trust that other people had found the pure, undivided light in his work, even when he couldn't. One takeaway among many from the last couple chapters of this book: I need to read some Allen Ginsberg
Chandler Sterling
I'll have to look into Simone Weil; Catholic mystic sounds like one of those pairings of words my heart has searched for even if I've never been able to voice them. Probably right up there with, "He seems to have really longed for grace," to describe the fatal flaw of Pound. He was trying to force grace into his life instead of continuing to let it flow through it. Something about that pining gives the whole shape of the chapter the last tap I needed for it to fall into place, so thank you for that! I also loved your mention of how auteur theory sort of misses the mark in a movie. It's a mistake of mediums, film doesn't really have an equivalent of an author, and considering the fact that some directors have no hand in writing scripts, there really isn't a good reason to treat a director as "authoring" their work. I think the role itself is already a great indicator of the job description. To put it in Pound's terms, they're in charge of Directing the Will up or down. A good director makes things greater than the sums of their parts, while a bad director makes something lesser.
azalea water
It wouldn’t surprise me if the 20th century Catholic mystic Simone Weil had an influence on Hyde. A lot of this chapter (especially section one) just emanates her philosophy on gravity and grace. To oversummarise — she thought that the soul was naturally brought down to earth, dampened. She called this “gravity”. She thought that when we lifted it up with kind actions or beauty, we were literally going against the natural course of the soul. She called this “grace”. I see this a lot in Hyde’s talk about Pound (and honestly, in a lot of Pound’s poetry). He seems to have really longed for grace, for some kind of beauty he struggled to put into words. And I think that’s why the beginning section on Pound’s struggle with “the erotic” (grace?) and “the will” (gravity?) fits so well. A lot of artists struggle with the balance between letting everything flow and fixing their ideas to form. “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.” — p285 Too many ideas, you look untrained. Too much form, you look like a show-off. Pound falls somewhere in the middle, and it’s fascinating. He seems in love with his medium to the point of over-correction. When I read the excerpts in this chapter, it’s like he’s trying to find the exact way to say what he wants in the most technical form possible. Seven languages. Line breaks a-plenty. Using metaphor as sparingly as possible. It feels like the grace and inspiration he found in life is being filtered with laser-focused precision. The effect (for me, at least) is that his poems are so clearly about something and yet so difficult to define exactly. It all reads like a code-riddled diary. I absolutely love this couplet… “In meiner Heimat where the dead walked and the living were made of cardboard.” It’s so damn cryptic and yet understandable. It shows an image of something I wouldn’t have words for delivered in three bare-bones lines. A great example of how order can lead us to find some grace in the strangest of places. We cannot live off vibes alone (“Electro-magnetism may trace a rose in iron filings, but it is powerless to induce order into sawdust.” — p291). I think this quote Hyde cites puts Pound’s type of art the best… “[Art is] those concrete details of life that make actual the mystery of our position on earth.” — Flannery O’Connor, p283 ____________ It’s sad to see a writer as gifted as Pound go from a slightly eccentric poet to a shit-talking antisemite. For a man who became the anonymous patron of 20th century literature, a free-fall into Mussolini's fascist crap is about the lowest you can go. There’s a real lightness to the excerpts of Pound’s poetry. He’s obsessed with a modernist idea of order and uses it in these really stunning ways. But that obsession with order goes too far, until he’s a mouthpiece for a dictator who couldn’t care less about him. One thing I will say about Hyde’s framing here is that I think he mixes up how politics and art intertwine. He appears to think that someone’s artistic world view should be directly related to their politics. Elliott and Pound thought of objects as the best way to translate their poetry — ipso facto, their politics turned into pure, soulless objectivism. “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.” — p305 This just isn’t true. I have no qualms with someone acting like a dictator in their creative process, spare that person being a dick. In art theory, we put so much emphasis on the creative vision of a single artist. And we do this for good reason. Too many cooks spoil the broth. If you want to view that through a political lens, this is totalitarianism, but we don’t call it totalitarian because art is not the same thing as politics. It’s false equivalence. There are obvious issues with this view of art, of course. I dislike auteur theory because it makes film look like the work of a single genius director and erases the effort put in by the actors, cinematographers, set designers, editors, etc. But art does usually need a savvy leader with more influence over the work in a way that democracy shouldn’t. You can get away with being a control freak with art, but in a parliamentary democracy, a control freak dies a slow and bureaucratic death. To be blunt, I think this is the same mistake Pound makes. He could be ordered, modernist, and controlling with his poetry, but applying that kind of spirit to government turns up nothing good. You kind of need too many cooks in a democracy. The point of the system is that the people (who tend to be politically moderate) have the choice over the law. And the people disagree on almost everything. But having a system like Mussolini's fascism or Pound’s economics messes up everything because democracy isn’t an art project. _______________________ Small note — Hyde’s been carving out a dichotomy for most of this book between Gifts and Capital. Gifts are relational objects that form bonds between people or communities of interest. Capital is a soulless exchange for the sake of money and the market. I love his addition of Hermes into the mix as a sort of value-neutral gift exchange. Both Gifts and Capital are the domain of Hermes and his road of merchandise. He’s just there for the ride. “When he’s the messenger of the gods he’s like the post office: he’ll carry love letters, hate letters, stupid letters, or smart letters. His concern is the delivery, not what’s in the envelope. He wants money to change hands, but he does not distinguish between the just price and a picked pocket.” — p314 This feels like the kind of ground I’ve been trying to find the words for this whole book.
