Ezra Pound and the Balance of Consciousness

The most efficient way to approach Ezra Pound’s artistic strug­gle with the problem of transcendence will be to use Eric Voegelin’s philos­ophy of human existence and history to analyze some of Pound’s guiding ideas about divine reality, history, language, and political order, especially as they shape and inform his epic poem The Cantos. To a reader familiar with both Pound and Voegelin, this might seem an odd pairing, not least because Voegelin’s philosophical achievement and outlook contrast so glaringly with the trajectory and incoherences in Pound’s poetic vision and personal life. In fact, though, some of Voegelin’s basic theoretical principles regarding di­vinity, consciousness, and history have their reflections in Pound’s deepest convictions.

If it is true that Voegelin’s exploration of these principles and their implications leads to a coherent philosophy and a sound political real­ism (with a complete rejection of totalitarian aims and principles), whereas Pound’s thought and work deriving from them wind up an inconsistent mix­ture of compelling vision and appalling oversight (symptomized by his sup­port of Mussolini’s Fascist government), still the range of their agreement on fundamental insights testifies to a certain shared brilliance. Furthermore, it makes Voegelin’s philosophy an exceptionally useful instrument for explain­ing why Pound’s is a mangled greatness.¹

The aspect of Voegelin’s thought most helpful for a critical appreciation of Pound pertains to Voegelin’s portrayal of human existence as conscious participation in the metaxy, the In-Between of reality. We have been emhasizing the basic, ontological sense of metaxy as existence in-between immanent world and transcendent mystery, time and timelessness, finite and nonfinite reality. However, the metaxy of human existence is also, we remember, a cognitional in-between, as all of our understanding and deciding occur in-between complete ignorance and complete knowledge; an affective in-between, living continually as we do in the tension between longing and satisfaction, hope and fulfillment; and a moral in-between, in that we struggle between imperfection and perfection.

All of these pairs of “poles” in-between which existence unfolds are implied in the statement that the metaxy is the place of human-divine encounter. To be human is to be aware of, and to be drawn in tension toward, that divine transcendence (nonfinite and timeless, perfect in goodness, knowledge, and love) in which we understand ourselves to participate. The in-between or metaxy of human existence, then, is sum­marily the in-between of human-divine encounter, where a person’s search for the ground of meaning meets the transcendent origin that moves the person to search for it, in a constant revelation of both their identity and their differences. “The In-Between,” as Voegelin puts it, is “. . . the meeting ground of the human and the divine in a consciousness of their distinction and interpenetration.”²

In Cosmological consciousness, we recall, divine reality is conceived in ways that do not with full critical clarity penetrate beyond the horizon of spatio-temporal imagination. When in various cultures the insights and symbols are introduced that conceptually separate reality into divine transcendence and worldly immanence, they bring with them, as we have seen, enormous problems both for speculative thought and for the informing of cultural and political institutions whose role is to promote the human good in light of a full awareness of human purpose and destiny. Especially — it cannot be emphasized enough— transcendence is misconceived as a faraway place or superpowerful entity. This in turn provokes the counter misconception that because there is indeed no such faraway place or superpowerful entity, the symbol transcendence must refer not to fact but to nonsense, to nothing at all.

To counter such misconceptions, Voegelin devotes many pages to the ex­periential origins of insights into transcendence, returning time and again to the crucial point that the terms transcendence and immanence do not refer to places or worlds or entities but are rather explanatory notations or “linguistic indices” that denote the structural elements of the In-Between of conscious­ness. The elements and the relationship indicated by the terms are essentially abstract, deriving from consciousness discovering the ontological conditions of its own questioning and intending. Such symbols are misunderstood when taken descriptively as referring to imaginable objects or places; as Voegelin emphasizes, they “are exegetic, not descriptive.”³

However misunderstood, and however popular the misunderstandings, the differentiation between immanent world and transcendent ground is well established in cultural and linguistic horizons both East and West. And everywhere it poses the same challenge to people who must make sense of their existences in light of this differentiation: the challenge of not letting the discovery of transcendence cause one to lose one’s balance in relation to the immanent and transcendent “poles” of reality. I have already, toward the end of the fourth chapter, mentioned Voegelin’s diagnostic notion of “balanced consciousness.” The “balance of consciousness” consists in not letting the discovery of transcendent meaning draw one into either (1) degrading immanent reality in light of the more perfect being of transcendence or (2) denying the fact or the implications of transcendence.

This balance of consciousness is not easy to maintain, as it requires admitting the permanent imperfection of finite existence — including all of our efforts to realize justice, order, and beauty in our lives — in relation to a perfection or fulfillment that is “be­yond” all that we can know or imagine; at the same time it requires that we not despair of the meaningfulness of our efforts, as we seek to attune imper­fect reality as best we can — through rational discernment, careful judgment, attentiveness to conscience, love, meditation, prayer — to permanently tran­scendent standards. One grows weary of this existential tension. Thus one is led to despise or ignore the world in favor of a perfection imagined to be elsewhere or later, or one impatiently seeks the realization of perfection in the here and now. In either case, the balance of consciousness is lost, and the vision of human existence as a movement in the In-Between of imperfection and perfection, of time and timelessness, of human and divine, is eclipsed and replaced by an image less troubling and mysterious.

Before turning to Pound’s work, let us clarify and expand upon the relevant elements in Voegelin’s analysis, bringing together a number of points made in previous chapters. First of all, the timeless ground is real. The structure of reality includes the transcendent ground of meaning, which we experience through participation. It is a “flow of presence” in all human consciousness, whether we attend to it or not, affirm it or not, and however sophisticated or unsophisticated our imaginative or conceptual portrayals of it. Ancient peo­ples experienced this presence as “the gods,” manifest entities encountered in the forces and regularities of the natural universe; increasing clarity about the transcendence of divine presence gradually “dedivinized” nature, and forced the resymbolization of the divine as a presence simultaneously more recon­dite (in not being perceivable by the physical senses) and more universal (in being everywhere and, of course, nowhere).

It should be stressed that this dedivinization of nature that accompanied waning belief in the Cosmologi­cal gods involved an emotional or experiential, but not a philosophical, re­moval of divine presence from finite reality. Indeed, the logic of the discovery of transcendence even more thoroughly irradiates both consciousness and nature with divine presence, because that presence is understood precisely as the nonfinite condition for the existence and good of every finite thing. Every place becomes the place of the intersection of the timeless with time. And human being is where that intersection comes to self-recognition and self-realization, where the flow of eternal divine presence orients temporal ex­istence, through human consciousness, toward timeless meaning and truth. Human beings, then, always “remain in the ‘in between,’ in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present. This flow [of divine presence] cannot be dissected into a past, a present, and a future of world-time, for at every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time.”⁴

Second, we recall the consequence of this for a proper understanding of history. History as it is generally conceived, as a linear course of events unfolding through time, is a jejune simplification that ignores the fact of timeless presence. The essential data of history, the significant events and patterns of events worth remembering, include, above all, human struggles to attune social and personal life to timeless divine truth; of particular significance are the breakthroughs in that struggle on occasions of the discovery of transcendence.

History, then, takes its meaning first of all from the epochal events of divine-human encounter — one might list the names of Lao-tzu, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, Socrates, Plato, and Mohammed — that have ramified over centuries and millennia into personal lives and into the fields of social and polit­ical institutions and relations. Also, the fact of timeless presence means that history is not something that is merely “past.” History is a “web of mean­ing” in which all humanity is implicated through the common flow of di­vine presence, and in which humans at all times and places are linked in a contemporaneity through participation in and orientation toward timeless meaning.⁵  History is not simply the unfolding of time; it is the intersection of the timeless with time. Historical progress, consequently, is not simply move­ment forward on a time line. It is, most essentially, success in attuning social and personal life to the truths of timeless meaning, a success that waxes and wanes in human communities, progress oscillating with decline in a historical process whose ultimate meaning and outcome remain a mystery.

This understanding of history in turn implies that a respect for tradition and earlier wisdom, a willingness to explore and preserve the insights and achievements of our predecessors, is a central civilizing impulse, insofar as we must use it to take our bearings in relation both to our position in history and to our situation in the In-Between of existence. Of course, the intellectual, artistic, political, and spiritual achievements of earlier persons and cultures found expression in symbolic forms peculiar to their times and places. How­ever, the ultimate human contemporaneity in the struggle for attunement, grounded in our common participation in timeless meaning, assures us that the recovery of the meanings of those symbolic expressions of various types of truth is possible and worthwhile — and even necessary, if we are to respond with utmost effectiveness to the civilizational challenges of our own place and time, because the best of our cultural inheritance articulates the high points of insight into the human struggle for meaningful existence in the In-Between.

A final implication of Voegelin’s analysis concerns the origins of true order in political and social life. Society becomes well ordered, that analysis reveals, only through the insights, decisions, and influence of individuals who have attained a clear understanding of what is possible and worthwhile in human affairs. Such individuals find their evaluative standards in the transcendent perfection that they accept as the measure of their own actions and goals. Thus, true order may be said to flow into society through the wisdom of individuals attuned to transcendent truths. This, of course, is the principle reflected in Plato’s account of the philosopher-king in the Republic, which, Voegelin reminds us, is not so much an argument for or against specific types of government as it is an exposition of the insight that order or disorder in society reflects the order or disorder in the souls of its leaders, and of the fact that the wise are few and the foolish many story.   

Pound on Divine Reality and Historical Truth

Turning now to Ezra Pound, we find that his work reveals a remarkable range of agreement with Eric Voegelin’s philosophical account of existence in the In-Between. To begin with, for Pound the gods are real, and so for him as for Voegelin experiences of human-divine encounter are a fact of existence. As Voegelin is a mystic philosopher in an age profoundly suspicious of mystery, so Pound is a genuinely religious poet in a generally irreligious age. As George Kearns points out at the start of his excellent guide to Pound’s Selected Can­tos, divine reality is constantly affirmed in his epic poem, through repeated descriptions and evocations of ” ‘magic moments,’ visions of the light, divine energies, paradisal states of mind,” an affirmation that must not be misinter­preted as a mere “literary conceit.” ⁶ Divine energy is the font of reality, the source of all things, the force that draws into patterns of beauty and order both the works of nature and those of human invention. This is true now, as it has always and everywhere been true.

Because it is true now, Pound’s task as an artist in a secular age includes the special responsibility of remembrance of this fact, poetic witness to the fact of divine mysteries. Because it has al­ways and everywhere been true, the hierophanies of all cultures and religions should be respected, Pound holds, and one of his poetic aims is to show that sacred stories and images from different traditions will, when juxtaposed, re­veal archetypal equivalence through their common root in the constants of human-divine encounter. For Pound it is through the visions of hierophanic experience that we ascend to the realm of the timeless, the transhistorical dimension of divine presence, the metaphysical realities that do not change, although their appearances to us do, bound as our perceiving is to the finite and imaginable. In sum, Pound confirms the human dwelling place to be the In-Between of time and timelessness, of immanence and transcendence.

For Pound the poet, such remembrance is a matter of visions preserved and revisited, and visions consist of images. “[T]he images of the gods,” he asserts, “. . . move the soul to contemplation and preserve the tradition of the un­divided light.”⁷ Images of divine presence erupt in lyric passages throughout The Cantos, images drawn from a variety of cultures but principally those of Greek, Roman, and Chinese mythology, and from the Neoplatonic tradi­tion including its Christian strands. Even detractors of Pound’s general poetic achievement have tended to admit the power of these passages, which reveal not only his openness to the sacred but his powers of artistry as well:

Gods float in the azure air,
Bright gods and Tuscan, back before dew was shed.
Light: and the first light, before ever dew was fallen.
Panisks, and from the oak, dryas,
And from the apple, madid,
Through all the wood, and the leaves are full of voices,
A-whisper, and the clouds bowe over the lake,
And there are gods upon them,
(3/11)⁸

And in thy mind beauty, O Artemis,
as of mountain lakes in the dawn,
Foam and silk are thy fingers,
Kuanon,
and the long suavity of her moving,
(110/778)

there came new subtlety of eyes into my tent,
whether of spirit or hypostasis,
but what the blindfold hides
or at carneval
nor any pair showed anger
Saw but the eyes and stance between the eyes,
colour, diastasis,
careless or unaware it had not the
whole tent’s room
nor was place for the full Εíδως
interpass, penetrate
casting but shade beyond the other lights
sky’s clear
night’s sea
green of the mountain pool
shone from the unmasked eyes in half-mask’s space.
(81/520)⁹

They also reveal a polytheistic enthusiasm that rushes to embrace every kind of hierophany, every species of “magical moment,” as long as it speaks to Pound of genuine encounter. As Guy Davenport explains, the poet “was in love with so many religions that we have to accept him as a pagan who couldn’t have too many gods on his hearth.”¹⁰

For Pound, without imaginative vision there is no ascent to the timeless; our feeling and apprehension of divine reality are impossible without the me­diation of images. This outlook explains his antipathy to both Hebraic and Protestant iconoclasm, as well as to theological doctrine and speculation in the form of philosophical abstractions. We ascend to the divine through im­age and contemplation; both the suppression of images and abstruse theo­logical argumentation destroy religion. “Tradition inheres . . . in the images of the gods, and gets lost in dogmatic definitions.”¹¹

Pound’s attraction to experiences and symbols from the world of Cosmo­logical myth, as well as his aversion to much of the Christian tradition, is explainable to some degree by that world’s openness to nature as a medium of revelation and its pluralistic tolerance for differing symbolic expressions of equivalent experiences of the divine.¹² Pound approves of all images and myths that help us to discover and contemplate the divine reality and the truths of human-divine encounter. His attitude recalls the words of the pagan philosopher Maximus of Tyre (second century c.e.): “If Greeks are stirred to the remembrance of God by the art of Phidias, or the Egyptians by paying worship to animals, or others by a river, or others by fire, I will not quarrel with their differences. Only let them know, let them love, let them remem­ber.”

Along with suppression of images and theological abstractions, then, Pound resists any kind of exclusivism that tries to secure a monopoly of reli­gious truth for one tradition, to bring the timeless mystery under dogmatic control, or to restrict our experiential access to it. He is convinced that if we cannot apprehend, in some way or another, the divine as the formative and transformative ground of the natural world we ourselves experience, then we are not apprehending nature as it really is at all. The lyric passages in The Cantos describing or invoking divine appearances in nature, so odd to mod­ern sensibility yet so poetically convincing, aim to remind us of our existence in the In-Between, to release our sense of the natural world from the fiction of pure immanence and reveal it as it truly is: saturated with the mystery of the divine and with potency for revelation. Thus, for Pound, Hugh Kenner declares, ” [t]o see gods was a way to see nature, not to use an antique way of talking.” When people lose their capacity for visions of the divine and the sense of the timeless fades, then according to Pound the invigorating heart of culture withers. “Without gods, no culture. Without gods, something is lacking,” he states tersely.¹³

Pound’s recognition of the crux of human existence as the encounter with timeless reality leads him to a sense and view of history that is similar to Voegelin’s in many respects. They both reject the popular notion of history as a steady march of civilizational progress, not simply on empirical grounds, but because if the divine is real, then meaning in history lies essentially in the attunement of any and all persons, and any and all social orders, with the divine ground of truth, goodness and beauty. Such attunement is gained and lost over time, both by individuals and by societies, and so history is an oscillation of progress and decline, or rather an unfolding over time of mul­titudes of oscillations among many persons and societies.

Pound does not imagine, therefore, any more than Voegelin does, that history is headed inex­orably toward some enlightened or perfected social order that marks the end of history. There have been, Pound believes, places and periods of civilization where exceptional good order, exceptional success in realizing the good and the beautiful in civic life, has been achieved. They have faded or disappeared, though, and were bound to do so, for the “conspiracy of intelligence” can­not ever be broadly effective for long against the forces of disorder — at the forefront of which Pound usually places “stupidity” — though it may live on underground.

So although Pound works hard at his self-appointed task of helping a new civilization “as good as the best that has been” to rise out of what he sees as a chaotic and decadent Western culture, he does not labor under the illusion that any civilizational gain achieved will be permanent. “Earthly paradises for Pound are various and have come and gone, for they are effective spiritual or social contexts gained at points of time”; and as time passes, the achievement invariably erodes, the orienting vision loses efficacy, the ordering energy is dispersed.¹⁴  However, past achievements vivid in the remembering mind are in a real sense not past at all, for Pound. His understanding of divine presence in his­tory enables him to recognize that the popular conception of the historical past as having receded irretrievably into a distance of time is a misconception based on a failure to appreciate human participation in timeless realities, and to appreciate that all who grasp and enact those realities are brought together in immediate and true contemporaneity.

Kenner notes that Pound’s early thought and poetry reflect a Romantic fascination with “the magic of time” and the “romance of temporal distance,” but that this fascination soon evap­orates. All of his mature and influential work reflects an anti-archaizing assumption that there are crucial human experiences and insights that, though conceived or written about or realized in different forms by different people in different cultures, are genuinely common and enduring because rooted in the timeless, and that, when we intelligently engage such experiences and insights in whatever image-form they are manifest, the “past” is in a sense obliterated; to put it somewhat more accurately, the “historical” comes into being in its simultaneous temporality and timelessness. It is precisely this un­derstanding of history and culture that guides The Cantos, both in the method of the poem’s construction and in Pound’s aim for it to be a “tale of the tribe” that helps us find meaning in history.¹⁵ The most striking, and initially dis­orienting, structural feature of the poem is its often sudden juxtapositions of events, persons, phrases, or images drawn from throughout history that Pound considers to be “subject-rhymes” revealing a common insight or el­ement in reality.

These are juxtaposed to create ever augmenting leitmotifs of complex images that are intended to reveal significant, repeated, underly­ing patterns of energy, constructive and destructive, in human affairs. These images Pound famously compares to ideograms built up from multiple units of meaning, organized to express the richest concentrations of meaning that the poet can achieve. For example, in Canto 74, Greek wisdom concerning the importance of an exact and authentic use of language is juxtaposed with Chinese wisdom on the same topic:

. . . because as says Aristotle
philosophy is not for young men
their Katholou can not be sufficiently derived from
their hekasta
their generalities cannot be born from a sufficient phalanx
of particulars
lord of his work and master of utterance
who turneth his word in its season and shapes it
Yaou chose Shun to longevity
who seized the extremities and the opposites
holding true course between them
(74/441-42)¹⁶

With this method Pound celebrates the distinct wisdoms of diverse cultures and great individuals and simultaneously annihilates the time and distance that separate them, turning history from a linear course of events into, in Voegelin’s phrase, a “web of meaning with a plurality of nodal points” whose ultimate reference is a transcendence known in the flow of timeless presence and its ordering influence. By forging in this way what Kenner calls “an ecumenical reality where all times [can] meet without the romance of time,” Pound hopes to help us find our bearings in our own historical situation, through understanding our relation to other civilizations as well as to their common ground.¹⁷

It follows that one of Pound’s deepest convictions is that anything excellent in present achievement must be founded on diligent retrieval of the best of the past. The poet whose language and style more than that of any other writer stand for the invention of a revolutionary modernism invariably in his work expresses contempt for the idea of novelty for its own sake. The motto he adopts from a Chinese emperor, “Make It New” —

Tching prayed on the mountain and
wrote MAKE IT NEW
on his bath tub
Day by day make it new
(53/264-65)

— signifies not the artist’s duty to reject tradition, but rather the obligation to reclaim, revivify, and apply energetically to the present the best of tradi­tion. The slogan, as Donald Davie observes, “is a recipe for conservation, for protecting past monuments in all their potency.”¹⁸

We can do this only if we respect and meditate carefully on the language, the symbols, in which any such wisdom has come down to us. A respect for careful interpretation and use of terms, insistence on the need to attend to the experiential perceptions and insights that words and other symbols convey, again unites Pound and Voegelin. Language can become bankrupt through laziness or corruption of mind, can degenerate into cliché (disastrous to po­etry), can even be used “to conceal thought and to withhold all vital and di­rect answers.” When this happens, when “the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact,” Pound asserts, “. . . the whole machinery of social and individual thought and order goes to pot.” A precise use of language is the only means by which we can maintain and use our understanding of the important truths carried down to us by tradition and pass them on to those who come after us.

This is a view of language that presumes, of course, that there is a metaphysical stability behind language (the presumption that is the bane of the philosophers of groundlessness), that there are enduring truths of natural process that include “enduring con­stants in human composition.” Pound is never reticent about expressing his confidence that such constants exist, as here in “Patria Mia”: “One wants to find out what sort of things endure, and what sort of things are transient; what sort of things recur . . . to learn upon what the forces, constructive and dispersive, of social order, move; to learn what rules and axioms hold firm, and what sort fade, and what sort are durable but permutable, what sort hold in letter, and what sort by analogy only, what sort by close analogy, and what sort by rough parallel alone.”

This reads like a gloss on Voegelin’s description of his own work as involving a “search for the constants of human order in society and history.”¹⁹ This search is their common concern because, for both men, exact knowledge about such constants, gained through penetrating to the original perceptions underlying the symbolic formulations in which the greatest of our predecessors have expressed themselves, is the key to sustain­ing individual and social order.

The agreement extends further, because both men also give the same re­sponse to the question as to how that knowledge becomes socially or polit­ically effective: it does so through the guidance and influence of leaders — political and cultural — whose enlightened minds and sensibilities, moral virtue, and steadiness of will constitute an achieved order of the personal soul attuned to unchanging truths. Order flows into society through the medium of great individuals, who as rulers can move the people toward a civic order in harmony with the divine and with natural human ends. However, if Voegelin turns to Plato and Aristotle for the foundational articulation of this truth, for Pound it is provided in the teachings of Confucius (K’ung-Fu-tzu), whose formulation of the core principle Pound briefly paraphrases in the beautiful Canto 13:

And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put order in his dominions.
(13/59)

This theme runs right through The Cantos, and both there and in the rest of Pound’s writings Confucius remains its central image, the paradigm of political authority and enlightened source of civic order. Pound’s fascination with Confucius may seem curious to a Westerner, but nevertheless explain­able. More troubling for Pound’s reader is his choice of certain other “great individuals” whom he holds up for admiration and emulation, most notably Mussolini. In fact, if we compile a brief list of Pound’s heroes — Confucius, Sigismondo Malatesta, Voltaire, Jefferson, John Adams, Mussolini — and note that such figures as Plato, Jesus, Buddha, Augustine, and Aquinas are ab­sent, we find a significant clue to the parting of the ways between Pound and Voegelin.

The list indicates a decided bent on Pound’s part toward confidence in what can be achieved through direct political action. It suggests a feature of Pound’s character and thought that is finally decisive, from the point of view provided by Voegelin’s analysis, in distorting his vision of human ex­istence in the In-Between: his distrust of transcendence in its full radicality, and, in his representation of the human situation, his habitual collapsing of transcendence into the quasi immanence of that which can appear to human intellect and imagination and can appear in and through human action. For all his insight into timeless reality, Pound slips away from “the balance of consciousness” in the direction of an immanentist construction of reality and human purpose.   

Pound’s Resistance to Radical Transcendence

Pound’s brand of immanentism, of course, is quite different from those of philosophical materialists or secular progressivists: it has ample room for the divine and its mystery, but still at a certain limit Pound balks at the full implications of transcendence. The closest he gets to an embrace of radical transcendence is his approving use of the light symbolism he finds in the Neoplatonic mystical tradition, the notion of the “undivided light” of which all visible things are but manifestations.

Shines

in the mind of heaven God
who made it
more than the sun
in our eye.
(51/250)

Light tensile immaculata
the sun’s cord unspotted
“sunt lumina” said the Oirishman to King Carolus,
“OMNIA,
all things that are are lights”
(74/429)

Pound is comfortable with the notion of the divine mind, the Platonic Nous, as an original “light” that both constitutes reality and is refracted in the “light” of human understanding, and he gives credit to Plato for establishing the symbolic tradition: “What we can assert is that Plato periodically caused enthusiasm among his disciples. And the Platonists after him have caused man after man to be suddenly conscious of the reality of the nous, of mind, apart from any man’s individual mind, of the sea crystalline and enduring, of the bright as it were molten glass that envelops us, full of light.”

Yet in Pla­tonic and other mystical traditions there is a further level of affirmation where Pound will not follow, in which the acknowledged participation of the human mind in the divine light greets a border of unyielding darkness, a “beyond” that is only darkness to our understanding: Plato’s “being beyond being,” the mystery of the mystery.²¹ Voegelin refers to this reality in Anamnesis as “the ineffable,” of which we can know only that it lies beyond what we can know. As he says, “[I]n the tension toward the [divine] ground we have experience of a reality that incomprehensibly lies beyond all that we experience of it in participation,” and we “can speak of the incomprehensible only by character­izing it as reaching beyond the symbolic language of participation.” It seems that when Pound is faced with this “tension between symbol and ineffability,” his agreement turns to suspicion. Kenner addresses this when he states that Pound’s openness to mythic symbolization ends when the symbols begin to differentiate a dimension of reality that cannot be addressed in terms of appearance, that Pound was “never willing to concede a shift of dimension between crystalline myth and the polymorphous immediate.”

So the radically transcendent God of Hebrew and Christian faith is notably absent from The Cantos; the “divine beyond” of Moses and Jesus that has been understood as condemning other gods and other revelations to falsehood or irrelevance is unacceptable to Pound, who sees its worship as having undermined our abilities to perceive the divine in nature and to seek out and trust in our own ecstatic experiences. Therefore, as a guide to the divine he will “substitute for the Moses of the Old Testament the Ovid of the Metamorphoses, with [the latter’s] recognition of the vivifying personal immediacy of supernatural forces and the constant penetration of the supernatural into the natural.”²² Buddhism and Taoism likewise for Pound place too much stress on an oth­erworldly transcendence, so that in his view their teachings easily degenerate into the promotion of superstitions, such as the belief that magic rituals can guarantee personal immortality. In The Cantos we find the rigorous, realistic Confucianists contrasted with the passive Buddhists and degenerate Taoists (whom Pound derisively calls “taozers”):

And there came a taozer babbling of the elixir
that we’d make men live without end
and the taozer died very soon after that.
(54/288)

And of Taosers, Chu says:
concerned neither with heaven, earth
or with anything on the square
but wholly subjective, for the Dragon moaning,
the screaming tiger, mercury, pills, pharmacopia,

And the Bhud rot: that floaters eat
without maintaining their homesteads
(99/696-97)

Pound’s frustration with feverish otherworldliness is understandable: he realizes it to be a self-comforting or self-aggrandizing fiction in which the experienced unity of the In-Between of human existence is imaginatively split into distinct entities; he abhors the superstitious mind that seeks magical powers over nature or avenues to personal immortality, ignoring the suffi­cient beauty and mystery of natural processes —

Hast’ou seen the rose in the steel dust
(or swansdown ever?)
(74/449)

— and abandoning the concrete conditions of existence, with their real chal­lenges and opportunities for personal and social improvement. This last point should be underscored. At the core of Pound’s refusal to affirm a radical transcendence is his conviction, buoyed by the popularity of images of other worlds and immortal delights, that such affirmation vitiates our interest in and energy for purposeful action in the world. “The concentration or em­phasis on eternity is not social,” he grumbles, and what is needed is “a sense of social responsibility.”²⁴ It is an understandable irritation: he is fighting against the loss of the balance of consciousness in the direction of ignoring or degrading immanent reality in light of the perfection of transcendence. However, it pushes Pound into an opposite imbalance, in which recogni­tion of the ultimate transcendence of timeless standards of truth, beauty, and goodness is replaced by an impatient desire and effort to realize those stan­dards in the In-Between.

This denial and impatience manifest themselves in a number of related aspects of his thought and work, yielding a specifically Poundian idiosyncratic mixture of insights into the human-divine truth of the In-Between and oversights about the full implications of transcendence. Returning to the question of history, while Pound is no naive progressivist and understands that civilizational progress alternates with decline, in the bulk of his work he still portrays the ultimate telos of human community in terms of a civic order to be built by leaders with sufficient wisdom and strength of will. He is not inclined to accept Saint Augustine’s distinction be­tween the city of God and the earthly city, nor the Platonic insight that the perfectly just city exists only as “a pattern . . . laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees,” and that it “doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere.”²⁵

Whether it exists “somewhere” on earth does make a difference to Pound. And out of that stance comes his support of Mussolini and Italian Fascism. Pound’s writings present Mussolini as a leader who understands what the people truly need, and who is willing to take action unhampered by degenerate “democratic” scruples deriving from ignorant fear and resentment of exceptional talent — “Democracies electing their sewage / till there is no clear thought about holiness” (91/613-14) — a ruler who respects the role of higher culture in establishing civic order, who can shape society along the lines of Confucian principles. For Pound, such a leader is justified in imposing his vision on society, as he is a lover of order, not of power, and he asserts his belief

that the Duce will stand not with despots and the lovers of power but with
the lovers of

ORDER
τò καλòν

However, the faith in Mussolini must be seen as part of a larger pattern of judgment reflecting Pound’s long-held conviction that social injustice, war, indeed all human evils following on the misuse of will, can be alleviated or eliminated through proper government — at least for a time — if only the ruler’s vision is clear enough and the will is strong enough. As Guy Daven­port states, “Pound has always gone on the principle that if a thing can be thought it can, by golly, be done. One can animate the dead past and make it live again in a poem (The Cantos), one can find out the causes of wars, one can educate the people and make them noble.”²⁷ The key word in this description of Pound’s energetic optimism is educate. Like Socrates, Pound is convinced that evil arises from ignorance, not from perverted will; if govern­mental leaders are sufficiently educated, and implement policies — especially economic policies — that in turn guarantee adequate guidance and education of the populace, the causes of disorder in human society will surely diminish, and a just society, reflecting timeless principles of order and beauty, begin to flourish.

Marion Montgomery and others have pointed out that this political con­fidence of Pound, manifest in his idealization of Fascism and Mussolini, is based in part on his faith in language itself: a conviction that when language is exact, and communicates perfected knowledge, it has an essentially irre­sistible power to transform and guide the individual will. To Pound, says Montgomery, ideal language “is an infallible medium that transubstantiates external existence in such a way that the mind is powerless to disgorge it,” the result being that by a kind of causal necessity, proper intention and action follow from “the right word spoken.”²⁸

Voegelin has no such confidence in the power of language. Pound’s view of it would appear to him a dream of sorcery, reflecting the desire for a magically infallible means of transmuting disordered into ordered wills. Voegelin would reply that one must never forget not only the extent to which the efficacy of language depends on the recipient having had, or being able to have, the ex­periences and insights of which the language is the symbolic expression, but also that even understood language can be rejected by a perverse will, by a will committed to self-assertion, dominated by disordering desires, or over­whelmed by the anxieties of existence. To imagine that the will’s imperfection is correctable by human language, however exact and authentic its use, is, for Voegelin, a symptom of the refusal to accept the human situation in the In-Between as a tension toward transcendent perfection.

Voegelin’s analysis suggests that Pound’s confusion about the perfectibility of the will is linked to his resistance to radical transcendence, because it is only within the logic of affirming that divine perfection is somehow “beyond being” that human moral imperfection, including deviance of the will, can be understood and accepted in the permanence of its tension toward what cannot be perfected within the known conditions of existence. The resistance of the will to its own good is a mystery, and this is at least one mystery that Pound seems unwilling to accept. In his assessment of the human condition there is no mystery of iniquity, no reflection of the Christian doctrine of the perversion of the will; “original sin,” as George Kearns states, is not a term in Pound’s vocabulary.²⁹

Consequently, Pound’s view of evil, like his view of transcendence, is not radical enough: he does not acknowledge the fact of moral impotence, that the mind can know what is good yet still not act on that knowledge, or can act in violation of it. For Pound accurate knowledge of the good immediately results in — essentially is — moral goodness; it is a moral force (Pound’s primary symbol for it is virtu) that is the source of right order in self and society, a force that operates with the inevitability of a law of physics. Proper knowledge of the nature of virtu is obscured, he believes, by the teachings of religions characterized by worship of a radically transcendent divinity, which substitute a “mystery” of evil for clear understanding that evil is no more than the selfish ignorance correctable by the ordering force of moral knowledge:

The principle of good is enunciated by Confucius; it consists in establishing order within oneself. This order or harmony spreads by a sort of contagion without specific effort. The principle of evil consists in messing into other peoples’ affairs. Against this principle of evil no adequate precaution is taken by Christianity, Moslemism, Judaism, nor, so far as I know, by any monotheistic religion. Many “mystics” do not even aim at the principle of good; they seek merely establishment of a parasitic relationship with the unknown.³⁰

One consequence of this view of good and evil is that there is something dis­tressingly abstract about Pound’s diagnoses of problems in human affairs and his proposed solutions for them. His eager equation of moral knowledge with moral goodness and his denial of the perversity of the will lead him to under­value the significance of the struggle for moral maturity at the personal level, to ignore the mess and mystery of the concrete individual existing in the con­crete tension between ordering and disordering influences, who may or may not support the better angels of his nature.

This abstracting from the con­crete individual is what enables Pound to believe in systematic solutions — economic, political, cultural — to human problems, a belief in systems that Voegelin would argue is another signal that Pound has lost the balance of consciousness in the manner of trying to draw transcendent perfection into the range of cognitive and practical control.³¹ Such an effort always entails eclipsing the full mystery of the “beyond,” and along with it the truth of per­sonal order as a tension of existence in faith toward a transcendent ground. If we consider now the various immanentizing components of Pound’s thought, they help to explain a major feature, and failure, of The Cantos. The mythic vision they present is finally incoherent, not adequate either to Pound’s insights into the In-Between of human-divine existence or to Pound’s ambitions to tell the “tale of the tribe.”

As moving and convincing as the mythic elements in the poem are, they do not unite into a compelling vision of the meaning in human history in relation to the Whole: as Michael Bernstein asserts, Pound’s “insights into magic moments . . . cannot. . . ad­equately engage historical reality on its own terms.” Our analysis suggests that one of the reasons Pound ends up with only fragments of a mythos is that he fails to resolve the contradictions between his love of the divine and his resistance to the full depth of its mystery. He recognizes that existence unfolds in the intersection of temporal with timeless reality, but is not will­ing to affirm that timeless reality reveals itself in human consciousness only by revealing itself as reaching into the In-Between from an unknowability beyond human consciousness. To put it another way, he wants the gods that appear, but not the God who does not. With regard to history, Pound rec­ognizes that its essence is the history of the waxing and waning struggle for attunement with divine truth, but continues for much of his life to envision the perfected community in terms of that which can be fashioned on earth.

Even in his poet’s devotion to language, a related contradiction lurks: along with Voegelin, he understands that important and needed language symbols can become detached from the underlying experiences and insights that they were intended to express, and that one must work to penetrate to an exact understanding of what Voegelin would call their “engendering experiences,” but at the same time he ignores the very possibility of that gap between expe­rience and symbolization when he assumes that right words will of their own accord produce right knowledge and right action.

From the perspective of Voegelin’s philosophy, a visionary, poetic mythos adequate to the structure of history in the In-Between would have to move us to a sense of ultimate community (of cosmopolis) that transcends adequate figuration in terms of an earthly city; to a sense of human-divine encounter that embraces not only ecstasies, but also the opening of the soul to radical transcendence, where faith embraces also the episodes of unmet longing and waiting, “the periods of aridity and dullness, guilt and despondency, contrition and repentance”; and finally, to a sense of the ineffable divine grace that is the alpha and omega of the transfigurative process of history.³² In sum, such a mythos would be characterized by something in notably short supply in The Cantos: religious humility.

Coda

It is in short supply, but still it is not absent; it comes suddenly to the fore in the Pisan Cantos (Cantos 74 through 84), the part of the poem written by Pound after he had been arrested by Allied troops in Italy and held at the Detention Training Center near Pisa — first in an outdoor cage, until he had a breakdown, and afterward in a tent — while awaiting transport to a U.S. court to be tried on charges of treason. The Pisan Cantos show Pound reviewing the course of his life and his learning, reconsidering his convictions and com­mitments, sifting through his memory to try to find where he has been right and where he has gone wrong. They register an awareness of personal failure, of pride-induced blindness, and also a new degree of existential openness, a readiness to relax the will:

Pull down thy vanity, it is not man
Made courage, or made order, or made grace,
Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.
Learn of the green world what can be thy place
In scaled invention or true artistry,
Pull down thy vanity,
(81/521)

This note of humility deepens in the final drafts and fragments Pound com­posed for the poem during his late years, as the writing increasingly reflects a recognition that his epic poem does not, in fact, add up to a convincing vision of human history and divine reality:

But the beauty is not the madness
Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.
And I am not a demigod,
I cannot make it cohere.
(116/795-96)

To confess wrong without losing rightness:
Charity I have had sometimes,
I cannot make it flow thru.
(116/797)

And he pointedly confesses the misplacement of energy and love in his devo­tion to building the heavenly city on earth:

M’amour, m’amour
what do I love and
where are you?
That I lost my center
fighting the world.
The dreams clash
and are shattered—
and that I tried to make a paradiso
terrestre.
(117/802)

Paradiso there is indeed, but terrestre it is not. Pound’s inability or unwill­ingness to embrace transcendent meaning in the fullness of its mystery, it would seem, is at the center of the intellectual and artistic misjudgments that he came to see as having seriously marred his life and work. The failure of The Cantos as a convincing vision of human history and divine reality haunted Pound’s last decade, the years between 1961 and 1972 during which he rarely spoke, withdrawn into silence and self-doubt. During this time a reporter asked him, “Where are you living now?” Pound replied: “In hell.”³³

Pound’s complex achievement in The Cantos displays, in its idiosyncratic way, the terrible difficulty facing twentieth-century artists or thinkers who want to remain true both to the justice, order, and beauty that exists, has existed, and may yet be achieved in world and history, and to the fact of a divine reality that has manifested itself in many different guises to peoples of all places and epochs. Pound’s loss of the balance of consciousness occurs not because he attempts to stop history, as do the apocalyptists or modern gnostics or historiogenetic exclusivists who either claim special knowledge of divine being or try to absorb transcendent meaning fully into human insight, or because he closes himself off to transcendent meaning, as do the histori­cal immanentists and the philosophers of groundlessness. Rather, because in Pound the dynamism of wonder and inquiry that draws him toward transcen­dence balks at the ultimate mystery, at the transcendence of transcendence, his vision of history and divine reality does not cohere but fragments into beautiful and curious splinters.

His pluralistic embrace of religious epipha­nies turns aside from the Buddhist, Upanishadic, and Taoist insights into rad­ical transcendence, and he resists the radically transcendent God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. His understanding that history involves a waxing and waning of personal and social attunement to the divine ground hesitates at the recognition that divine reality lies ultimately beyond history. The erotic energy that informs his artistic evocations of divinity stops short of the rev­elation of the transcendent mystery as absolutely unrestricted love. Conse­quently, he remains “essentially a religious poet,” as Lewis Hyde notes, whose “work displays a curious incongruity: it is framed by clear declarations of erotic and spiritual ends which it does not achieve.”³⁴

If this critique is accurate, then the achievement of truly balanced visions of history and divinity must rest on ideas and images that give (1) the finite world, (2) the radical transcendence of the ground, and (3) human existence as the site of their conscious interpenetration their full and proper due.   

Notes

1. We will not address here the vexed topics of Pound’s trial for treasonous broadcasts during the Second World War; his notorious, at times rabid, anti-Semitism; or his mental instability and incarceration at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. For a plausible psychological sketch exploring how Pound’s famous generosity, his aesthetic principles, his economic views, his anti-Semitism, and his political stance during the war may have been linked in his imagination, see Lewis Hyde, “Ezra Pound and the Fate of Vegetable Money,” chap. 10 in The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 216-72.

2. Voegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” in Published Essays, 1966-1985, 233. On the human-divine metaxy as situated between various sets of “poles,” and on Voegelin’s warning that these “poles” in-between which consciousness moves must not be misconceived as objects independent of the tension within which they are experienced, see esp. Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” 119-23, and “Reason: The Classic Experience,” 279-82, both in Published Essays, 1966-1985; and “Eternal Being in Time,” 320-33, and “What Is Political Reality?” 373-81, both in Anamnesis. Voegelin is aware that this analysis results in the term human becoming funda­mentally ambiguous, insofar as it must refer both to the finite creature who apprehends himself or herself as distinct from the ground of being and to the “in-between” where immanence and transcendence, “world” and “divine,” interpenetrate. This ambiguity of the term human is in­evitable, deriving as it does from the paradox of consciousness as participation in the divine ground, as the experienced simultaneity of human nonidentity and identity with the ground of being. Voegelin suggests that we may keep the two meanings of the term human clear by dis­tinguishing between human consciousness as (1) the time-bound, finite “sensorium” of expe­rience and (2) the “site” of the experienced interpénétration of immanence and transcendence: “[W]hen man discovers his existence in tension, he becomes conscious of his consciousness as both the site and the sensorium of participation in the divine ground. As far as consciousness is the site of participation, its reality partakes of both the divine and the human without being wholly the one or the other; as far as it is the sensorium of participation, it is definitely man’s own, located in his body in spatiotemporal existence. Consciousness, thus, is both the time pole of the tension (sensorium) and the whole tension including its pole of the timeless (site)” (“Immortality: Experience and Symbol,” in Published Essays, 1966-1985, 90).

3. Voegelin, “Beginning and Beyond,” in What Is History? 185.

4. Voegelin, “Eternal Being in Time,” in Anamnesis, 329.

5. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 106. pp127-133

6. Kearns, Guide to Ezra Pound’s “Selected Cantos,” 9

7. Pound, “A Visiting Card” (1942), 307.

8. References to The Cantos will be given in the form (3/11), which means Canto 3, p. 11, in The Cantos of Ezra Pound. All further quotations from the poem will be from this edition.

9. Ειδώς means “form.”

10. Davenport, “Ezra Pound, 1885-1972,” in 173.

11. Pound, “A Visiting Card,” 322.

12. The pluralism inherent to the Cosmological perspective is discussed by Voegelin in the introduction to Israel and Revelation. There he explains: “If anything is characteristic of the early history of symbolization, it is the pluralism in expressing truth, the generous recognition and tolerance extended to rival symbolizations of the same truth. . . . The early tolerance reflects the awareness that the order of being can be represented analogically in more than one way. Every concrete symbol is true insofar as it envisages the truth, but none is completely true insofar as the truth about being is essentially beyond human reach” (45-46).

13. Maximus of Tyre translation by Frederick C. Grant, in his Hellenistic Religions, quoted in Mircea Eliade, ed., From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions, 54r; Kenner, The Pound Era, 30; Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 126

14. Pound, Guide to Kukhur, 263; Pound quoted in Kearns, Guide, 23; Eugene Paul Nassar, The Cantos of Ezra Pound: The Lyric Mode, 30.

15. Kenner, The Pound Era, 30,141; Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 194.

16. Katholou means “universal”; hekasta means “singulars (individual experiences).”

17. Voegelin, The Ecumenic Age, 106; Kenner, The Pound Era, 552.

18. Davie, Ezra Pound, 100.

19. Pound, “Interview: Ezra Pound,” 328; Polite Essays, quoted in Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, 42; Guide to Kulchur, 47; “Patria Mia” (1913), 125; Voegelin, “Equivalences of Experience,” in Published Essays, 1966-1985, 115.

20. The “Oirishman” is Scotus Erigena (810-877), whom Pound is quoting: “Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt” (all things that are, are lights).

21. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 44; The Republic of Plato 509b. For Voegelin’s analysis of this and other Platonic symbols of transcendence, see, for example, The Ecumenic Age, 292-300; and “Beginning and Beyond,” in What Is History? 212-22.

22. Voegelin, “What Is Political Reality?” in Anamnesis, 395-97; Kenner, The Pound Em, 15; Clark Emory, Ideas into Action: A Study of Pound’s Cantos, quoted in Donald Davie, Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor, 216.

23. Pound firmly chooses one side in the age-old conflict in Chinese culture between the “realistic” Confucian concern with human affairs and social ideals, with its confidence in the potentials of human intelligence and virtue, on the one hand, and the “transcendentalism” of Taoism and Chinese Buddhism, on the other. On the introduction and impact of Buddhist thought in China, and its relation to Confucian teachings and principles up through the great Neo-Confucian synthesis of the twelfth century, see Wm. Theodore de Bary, East Asian Civi­lizations: A Dialogue in Five Stages, 21-61. For a brief description of Confucian humanism versus Taoist and Buddhist transcendentalism in relation to Chinese poetry, see Burton Watson, Chi­nese Lyricism: Shih Poetry from the Second to the Twelfth Century, 73-74,124-26,169-72, 203-6.

24. Pound, Guide to Kulchur, 38-39.

25. The Republic of Plato 275 (592b).

26. Pound, Jefferson and/or Mussolini, quoted in John J. Espey, Ezra Pound’s “Mauberley”: A Study in Composition, 87. τò καλόν means “beauty, moral virtue.”

27. Davenport, “The Pound Vortex,” 167.

28. Montgomery, “Ezra Pound: The Quest for Paradise,” 84.

29. Kearns, Guide, 64.

30. Pound, “Prolegomena” (1927).

31. On the construction of “systems” as a symptom of revolt against the transcendence of the ground, see Voegelin, “Anxiety and Reason,” in What Is History? 82-83.

32. Bernstein, The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic, quoted in Lil­lian Feder, “Pound and Ovid,” 23; Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, in Modernity without Restraint, 187.

33. Hall, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, 255.

34. Hyde, The Gift, 219, 223.

This excerpt is from Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy From Ancient Societies to Postmodernity (University of Missouri Press, 2003); also see “The Terror of History” and “Voegelin’s Question of the Ground.”

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